Chimney sweep and wood stove service in Herscher, IL

By Jacob Dove, founder of Friendship Chimney Sweep · 29 years in the trade

How a wood stove flue is different from a fireplace flue

An open fireplace sends most of its heat and a lot of excess air up the chimney, which keeps the flue hot and the creosote light. A modern airtight wood stove does the opposite. It holds the heat in the room and sends a small volume of cooler, smokier exhaust up the flue, especially on an overnight burn with the air turned down. That exhaust condenses fast in a cold flue, and the creosote it leaves is the dense stage two and glazed stage three kind. A stove flue that is oversized, exterior, or uninsulated makes it worse, because the gases cool even faster. This is why a stove in a Herscher farmhouse connected to an old fireplace chimney will glaze the flue in a single season while the neighbor’s open fireplace goes three years between sweeps.

The fix is not to burn less; it is to give the stove the flue it was designed for. That means an insulated stainless liner sized to the stove outlet, usually six inches, running the full height of the chimney with a proper connector and a cap. A correctly sized, insulated liner stays hot, drafts strongly, and builds far less creosote. It also makes the annual sweep faster and cheaper. Outdoor boilers have their own venting rules and their own creosote problems, and we sweep and inspect those too.

What Herscher chimneys have in common

The Labor Day celebration in Village Park has been running for more than a century, longer than any other event in Kankakee County, and a lot of the homes along the parade route were here for most of it. Those downtown chimneys are brick, single-flue and built for coal. The bigger group, though, is the mid-century ranches that filled in when the village tripled in size. They have a masonry fireplace with a tile liner, an outside chimney on the north or west wall, and a crown that was poured thin and is now cracked. That combination, an exterior chimney taking the prairie wind with a cracked crown, is the most common repair we do in Herscher.

Out in the township, where the Herscher school district stretches across 250 square miles to Bonfield, Limestone, Reddick and Buckingham, the work is wood heat. Farmhouses with a stove in the kitchen and another in the basement, outdoor wood boilers piped into the house, and corn stoves that were popular a couple of decades back. Those flues run hard all winter and need sweeping every year without exception. We also see a lot of rural chimneys that have never had a cap, and after thirty years of rain the smoke shelf is a mud puddle.

Services in Herscher and the township

Every service is available in Herscher and the surrounding farms at the published price. No travel charge.

• Chimney sweeping — wood stoves, inserts and outdoor boiler flues included
• Level 1 and Level 2 inspections
• Masonry repair
• Stainless relining — insulated liners for stoves in old farmhouse chimneys
• Caps, crowns and dampers
• Gas fireplace tune-ups
• Dryer vent cleaning

Local links for Herscher

Herscher resources: Village of Herscher · Herscher High School