The People Behind the Work

The truck carries drop cloths, a sealed HEPA vacuum, a rod-and-brush set sized to your flue, hand brushes for the smoke shelf, and a camera on a flexible rod for looking up the liner. If gas work is on the ticket, the gas tools come too: manometer, combustion analyzer, brushes for the burner ports, and replacement thermocouples and thermopiles. The order is the same most visits. Cloths down and the hearth covered first, then the vacuum set at the firebox opening and running before anything is disturbed. The tech pulls the damper and the smoke shelf, checks the firebox and the connection, then runs the camera up the flue before deciding whether a brush is the right answer. Sweeping happens after that, top-down or bottom-up depending on access and chimney type. Then the camera goes back up for a second look, the crown and cap get checked, and you hear what was found with pictures to back it up. If the flue is clean and the liner is sound, we say so and skip the sweep. That happens more often than you'd think. Charging for a brush that isn't needed is a good way to lose a customer for good.

We work on open masonry fireplaces, sealed gas inserts and factory-built prefab units, including Heatilator, Heat & Glo, Majestic, Napoleon, Superior and Empire. Sweeping, inspection, caps, liners, flue work, firebox components and gas fireplace service are all in house. We do not do masonry or brickwork. If a crown is spalling or mortar joints have opened up, we will document it and tell you plainly that it's a mason's job, not ours. What we can handle on the chimney structure itself is covered under chimney repair: caps, chase covers, liners, dampers and flashing-adjacent work on prefab chases.

Palos Hills sits in Chicago's southwest suburbs, built out largely between 1950 and 1980 on former farmland and moraine woodland, with scattered infill and townhome construction into the 2000s. That era split means two distinct chimney populations: solid masonry brick chimneys with clay tile liners on the older ranches and Georgians, and metal Class A factory-built chimneys inside framed, sided chases on anything built after the mid-1970s. Cook County and Illinois impose no daily no-burn restrictions on residential fireplaces, so wood burning here is a choice rather than a regulated one. Cheap pipeline gas has pushed a lot of households to gas logs and sealed inserts. Many flues see light, intermittent seasonal use. Light use isn't the same as clean. Unused and underused flues pick up moisture damage and animal nesting from chimney swifts, raccoons and starlings in spring, and tile cracking faster than they pick up creosote. The real driver is freeze-thaw: repeated 32-degree crossings from November through March push water into crowns, mortar joints and unglazed brick, then expand it. Spring and fall calls here are mostly nesting removal, damper and cap replacement, water staining on the firebox wall, and gas units that won't light after a season off. On cost, the things that move the number on a sweep are chimney height and roof pitch, whether the crew can work from the top or has to go bottom-up through the firebox, how many flues share the stack, and whether what we find is a brush job or a nest packed into eight feet of liner. Wood-burning households putting a cord or more through a season need the sweep every year. Everyone else gets looked at annually and swept when the camera says it's time.