Chimney sweep and wood stove flue service in Bonfield, IL

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

Bonfield: small village, hard-working flues

Bonfield has one payphone, famous for a few seconds in Steve McQueen’s last film, and about the same number of chimneys as it had fifty years ago. They are old brick, single-flue, and a lot of them were built by the same quarrymen and railroad hands who founded the village. Inside the village the chimneys serve gas furnaces now and need the camera inspection any old masonry flue with a gas appliance needs. Outside it, the story is wood. Farmhouses with a stove in the kitchen, a second stove in the basement, and increasingly an outdoor wood boiler in the yard piped into the house. Those flues burn from October to April and build creosote fast.

Bonfield Grade School is in the village and the older kids go to Herscher, so we treat Bonfield as part of the same run as Herscher and Limestone. The most common things we fix out here are chimneys that never had a cap, thimbles where a stove pipe enters an unlined flue, and crowns that the open-prairie weather has broken. Every one of them is cheaper to fix in September than in January.

Services in Bonfield and the township

All seven services at published prices, grouped with Herscher and Limestone. No travel charge for rural addresses.

• Chimney sweeping — stoves, boilers and farmhouse flues every fall
• Level 1 and Level 2 inspections
• Masonry repair
• Stainless relining — insulated liners for stoves connected to old flues
• Caps, crowns and dampers
• Gas fireplace tune-ups
• Dryer vent cleaning

Creosote stages and what each one takes to remove

Creosote forms when wood smoke condenses on a flue wall that is cooler than about 250 degrees, and it comes in three stages that tell us how the chimney has been used. Stage one is a dry, flaky soot that brushes off easily; it means the fires were hot and the wood was dry. Stage two is a crunchy, tar-like layer that a brush takes off in chunks; it means some smoldering burns, some wet wood, or a flue that runs cold. Stage three is glazed creosote: a hard, shiny, tar coating fused to the flue wall that looks like black glass. It comes from cool, smoky fires in a cold flue, exactly what an airtight stove on an overnight burn does in an uninsulated exterior chimney, and it is the most flammable form. A quarter inch of stage three in a Bonfield farmhouse flue is a chimney fire waiting for one hot fire.

Stage one and two come off with the right brush, and we report the stage so you know how the burning went. Stage three needs more. A rotary cleaning head on a flexible shaft chips it off a tile flue; on a stainless liner we use a poly head so we do not scar the steel. Heavy glaze gets a chemical creosote modifier applied on one visit that turns the glaze brittle for removal on the next. The permanent fix is to stop making it: dry wood, hotter fires, and an insulated liner sized to the stove so the flue stays warm enough that the smoke does not condense in the first place.

Local links for Bonfield

Bonfield resources: Herscher High School