Chimney sweep and liner service in Chebanse, IL

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

Chebanse: little duck, old chimneys

The name comes from the Potawatomi for little duck, the town came from the railroad, and Harold Gray, who drew Little Orphan Annie, grew up on a farm nearby. The houses are what you would expect of a village that has been roughly the same size since the Model T: frame homes from the 1880s through the 1960s, each with a brick chimney that once served a coal stove and now serves a gas furnace, a wood stove, or nothing at all. When we sweep here we usually find one of three things. A furnace flue with rust and grit in the cleanout, which means the tile joints are failing. A wood stove or insert connected to an unlined flue. Or a fireplace nobody has used in twenty years with a smoke shelf full of leaves and a nest on top.

The cruise-in at American Legion Park brings the whole village out in summer, and it is a good time to get the annual sweep and inspection done while the weather is warm and the schedule is open. The farms around Chebanse are wood-heat country, and those flues get swept every fall without fail.

Local links for Chebanse

Chebanse resources: Village of Chebanse · Central High School (Clifton)

Services in Chebanse

Every service at published prices, grouped with Clifton and Herscher jobs. No travel charge.

• Chimney sweeping
• Level 1 and Level 2 inspections — including gas furnace flues in older homes
• Masonry repair
• Stainless relining — the answer for stoves and inserts in unlined village chimneys
• Caps, crowns and dampers
• Gas fireplace tune-ups
• Dryer vent cleaning

Flexible or rigid: choosing a stainless liner

Stainless liners come in two forms and we choose between them chimney by chimney. A flexible liner is a corrugated stainless tube, usually 316Ti for wood, that bends through offsets and can be fed down a flue from the top in one piece. It is the right choice for most Chebanse chimneys because so many of them jog around a beam or a second flue, and because it goes in fast, usually in a single day. Its corrugations make the inside surface slightly rougher than a smooth pipe, which is why it needs to be sized correctly and, for a wood stove, insulated so the exhaust stays hot enough to keep creosote light.

A rigid liner is smooth-walled stainless pipe in sections, joined as it goes down. It has better draft for a given diameter, sheds creosote more easily, and is the better choice in a straight flue with no offsets, especially a tall one. It cannot bend, so a chimney with an offset gets rigid sections above and below and a short flexible section through the jog, or a fully flexible liner. Either type is listed to UL 1777 and either comes with a lifetime manufacturer warranty when installed by a professional and swept annually. The wrong choice is a liner that is too big; an oversized liner in a cold exterior chimney glazes with creosote as fast as an unlined flue.