Chimney sweep and inspection in Clifton, IL

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

Clifton chimneys, from Main Street to the section roads

Clifton has kept its 1893 weekly newspaper, its historical museum and its walking path along North Main, and it has kept its chimneys too. Almost every house in the village was built before 1960, and most still have the brick chimney it was built with. Some have tile liners in decent shape; some are unlined; a fair number have been used for so many different appliances over the years, coal stove, then oil furnace, then gas furnace, then a wood stove in the 1970s energy crunch, that nobody remembers what the flue was originally for. Those are the chimneys that most need a camera, because each change of appliance put a different stress on the same tile.

Outside the village, the farms along the section roads heat with wood and the flues run hard. We sweep those every fall and reline the ones where the camera shows the tiles have failed. Clifton is also one of the towns where we most often find a chimney venting both a furnace and a water heater into a flue that is far too large for either, which is a carbon monoxide risk the homeowner never sees.

Services in Clifton

All seven services at published prices, grouped with Chebanse and Herscher. No travel charge.

• Chimney sweeping — annual sweeps for village and farmhouse wood stoves
• Level 1 and Level 2 inspections — Level 2 scans on flues that have served several appliances
• Masonry repair
• Stainless relining
• Caps, crowns and dampers
• Gas fireplace tune-ups
• Dryer vent cleaning

Why the same flue cannot serve every appliance

A flue is sized for the appliance connected to it. A coal stove wanted a big flue and produced hot, dry exhaust. An oil furnace wanted something similar. A modern gas furnace produces cool, wet exhaust and wants a small, insulated flue, and a wood stove wants a flue exactly the size of its outlet, hot and insulated, to keep creosote down. When one chimney has served all four over eighty years, it has been the wrong size for at least three of them, and each mismatch left its mark: acid damage to the mortar from the gas years, creosote glazing from the stove years, cracked tiles from a chimney fire nobody noticed.

The rule under NFPA 211 and the fuel gas code is straightforward: a solid-fuel appliance gets its own flue, never shared; gas appliances can share a flue only when the flue is correctly sized for the combined input and the vent connectors are arranged properly; and any masonry flue serving a modern gas appliance should be lined with a corrosion-resistant liner sized to the appliance. In practice, in a Clifton house, that means a Level 2 camera inspection to see what the last eighty years did, then usually a stainless liner sized to whatever is going to vent through the flue now. It turns an ambiguous old chimney into a known quantity.

Local links for Clifton

Clifton resources: Village of Clifton · Central High School