Had a close call with a hidden flue liner last Tuesday

Honestly, I was doing a routine clean on a 1950s brick chimney in Springfield. The homeowner said it had been fine for years, so I wasn't expecting trouble. I sent my camera down and everything looked clear, but when I started the brush, I felt a weird drag. Turns out, the original clay liner had cracked and a big section had collapsed inward, creating a jagged ledge about eight feet down. My brush got hooked on it, and if I'd pulled any harder, I could have dislodged the whole mess into the firebox. Took me three hours with a different set of rods to carefully break it up and vacuum it out. Has anyone else run into a liner failure that wasn't obvious from the top or the fireplace?

3 comments

3 Comments

taylorc405d ago

Yeah, that "weird drag" feeling is the only warning you get sometimes. Those old clay liners can look intact from the top, but the mortar turns to dust and the sections shift. I've found a few where the top six feet are perfect, but it's just a pile of rubble further down. Always makes me sweat when the brush just... stops.

craig.mila4d ago

Ugh, tell me about it. I once spent twenty minutes convinced my brush was just stuck on some soot, only to find a liner that looked like a jigsaw puzzle, kind of like what @smith.anna was getting at with hidden problems. My pride took more of a beating than the chimney that day.

smith.anna5d ago

Man, that's scary. It's like @taylorc40 said, things can seem fine on the surface while they're falling apart underneath. I see this everywhere now, not just chimneys. My old neighborhood looks nice from the street, but the pipes under the roads are from the 1920s and keep breaking. It's that same idea of hidden decay, you know? We fix what we can see and just hope the stuff we can't see holds together a little longer.