Chimney sweeping and cleaning in Bourbonnais and Kankakee County

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

Why creosote is the reason you sweep

Every wood fire sends unburned gases up the flue. When those gases hit a cooler section of chimney they condense into creosote, and creosote builds in stages. Stage one is a flaky soot that a brush takes off easily. Stage two is a crunchy, tar-like layer that needs a stiffer brush and more passes. Stage three is a glazed, shiny coating that has hardened onto the liner and will not come off with brushing alone. We see all three in Kankakee County, and the difference usually comes down to how the fire was burned: wet wood, smoldering overnight burns and a damper closed too far all push a chimney toward stage three fast.

Creosote is the fuel for a chimney fire. A quarter inch anywhere in the flue is the point where the Chimney Safety Institute of America says a sweep is due, and that is the standard we work to. The National Fire Protection Association’s NFPA 211 standard calls for an annual inspection of every chimney that vents a solid-fuel appliance, and sweeping when the inspection finds deposits. That is our schedule too.

How Jacob’s crew sweeps a chimney

1. Protect the room. Drop cloths from the door to the hearth, the fireplace opening sealed with a fitted cover, and a HEPA vacuum running the whole time. We sweep from inside the house on most masonry fireplaces, so nobody is walking on your roof unless the cap or flue needs it.
2. Check before we brush. A flashlight up the flue and a look at the smoke chamber tells us the creosote stage and whether there is a nest, a broken tile or a stuck damper. If we see something that changes the job, you hear about it before we continue.
3. Brush the full flue. Rods and a brush sized to your flue, worked from the firebox to the top. Square and rectangular clay tile flues get a matching square brush; round stainless liners get a poly brush that will not scratch the steel. Glazed creosote gets a rotary head and, when needed, a chemical treatment that is applied first and swept on a second visit.
4. Clear the smoke shelf and damper. This is where most of the debris lands and where most sweeps that were done cheaply were done badly. We clean it by hand.
5. Confirm the flue is clear. Light, mirror, and on request a camera pass. You see what we see.
6. Clean up and report. The vacuum runs until the last cloth is folded. You get a short written summary with photos of anything worth watching.

Prefab and factory-built fireplaces

A lot of homes built in Bourbonnais, Bradley and Manteno after about 1985 have a factory-built fireplace with a round metal flue rather than a masonry chimney. These sweep differently. The flue sections are thin double- or triple-wall pipe, the chase cover on top rusts out, and the refractory panels in the firebox crack. We brush these with the right size poly brush, check every visible joint, and tell you plainly if the unit is at the end of its listed service life.

Wood stoves and inserts

Inserts and stoves need the connector pipe and the liner behind them cleaned as well as the flue. If an insert was slid into an old fireplace without a full liner, which we still find in older Kankakee homes, the creosote piles on the smoke shelf where nobody sees it. We pull the insert when we have to and put it back level.

Signs it is time to call

• A campfire smell in the house on humid summer days.
• Smoke rolling into the room when you open the damper.
• Black flakes on the hearth or in the firebox after a fire.
• Poor draft that has been getting worse over a season.
• You bought the house and have no record of the last sweep.
• More than a cord of wood burned since the last cleaning.

The sweep is also when we notice the small things: a cap screen packed with leaves, a cracked crown, mortar joints that are starting to open. None of those get fixed without your say-so, but you will know about them while they are still cheap to deal with. Pricing for a sweep, and for a sweep combined with a Level 1 inspection, is on our pricing page.