Your local chimney repair team in Florida Center

Water, heat and movement wear a chimney out

Three forces wear a chimney down over time. Water gets in at the top and at the roofline, soaking mortar, rusting metal and staining the rooms below. Heat works from the inside, on the flue lining and the chamber above the damper. Movement shows up as cracks and gaps where masonry has shifted or pulled away from the house.

One visible symptom can come from more than one force. A cracked joint may be years of water working into the mortar, or masonry moving because something beneath it has shifted. BIA guidance on maintaining brick says the origin of a problem should be found and both the cause and the visible effect corrected, which is why a patch over the mark alone does not settle it.

At your Florida Center home, each finding is sorted by the force behind it before anything is priced. The written estimate groups the repairs the same way, so you can see which lines stop water, which deal with heat damage and which address movement.

Where the flue liner meets the crown

A flue liner should stand up out of the crown rather than stop flush with it. BIA guidance shows the liner extending above the top of the cap, and the Florida Building Code requires a caulked bond break around any flue liner at the cap.

The point of a bond break is that the liner and the cap stay separate pieces. BIA guidance has the cap and liner interface thoroughly primed, backed and sealed to reduce the potential for water getting in. Solid mortar packed tight against the liner locks the two into one rigid piece, and a rigid joint that cracks opens a path for water right beside the flue.

This joint gets its own look on every chimney. The fix is written as a separate item, apart from any work on the crown surface.

• Cracked mortar packed against the liner
• A missing or split sealant bead
• A liner that stops at or below the crown surface

A coating is not a new crown

BIA guidance on coatings for brick is blunt about what a clear repellent or a brush-on coating can do. Water usually gets into masonry at cracks and separations, and a repellent cannot stop water getting in through ineffective caps or copings or through mortar joints that were never filled.

A coat spread over a broken crown also hides it. The cracks stop showing from the ground while water keeps finding them. The same guidance says a repellent is not recommended in place of common repairs such as repointing or replacing spalled and cracked brick.

When a crown is cracked, broken or has lost its slope, the estimate prices a crown repair or a new crown, not a coating. Any water repellent on the masonry below is a separate question for after the repairs, written as an optional line rather than as the fix for the top.

The smoke chamber above the damper

Above the damper of a masonry fireplace, the opening narrows into the flue through a sloped space called the smoke chamber. The Florida Building Code has its walls built of solid masonry, with the inside surface parged smooth with refractory mortar.

Some chambers were left rough, with stepped brick that catches soot, and in others the parging has cracked and fallen away. Mortar crumbs on the smoke shelf, a chamber that stays black and crusted after sweeping and open gaps between bricks are the findings that point to repair.

Our smoke chamber repair service cleans the chamber, fills the voids and parges the walls smooth with refractory mortar. That work is written as its own line, separate from the damper and the flue above it, so you can see what each part of the fireplace needs.