A Momence wood stove was venting into an unlined 1880s chimney. Here is what we did.

By Jacob Dove, Friendship Chimney Sweep

The setup

The house sits a few blocks from Island Park, built in the 1880s with a brick chimney meant for a coal stove. Sometime in the late 1970s a previous owner slid a wood stove into the front room and ran the stovepipe into the chimney through the old thimble, the round hole where the coal stove pipe used to go. It had worked, in the sense that smoke went up and out, for forty-some winters.

What the inspection found

The flue had no liner at all: bare brick and mortar the whole way up. The mortar joints on the inside were recessed nearly an inch in places, and the pockets were packed with stage three creosote, the glazed kind that ignites hottest. Above the thimble the brick was heat-discolored. In the attic, a rafter sat directly against the chimney with no clearance and a dark scorched patch where the brick had been hottest. The owner had, by his own count, had at least two “loud” fires in the flue over the years and thought that was normal.

The fix

We swept out the glaze with a rotary head over two visits, then installed an insulated 316Ti stainless liner sized to the stove’s six-inch outlet, running the full height with a tee at the bottom for the stovepipe and a cleanout cap. The liner’s insulation gives it a zero-clearance listing, so the rafter contact is no longer a heat problem, though we still recommended a carpenter cut it back. New cap, new connector, and the stove now drafts better than it has in decades because the flue is the right size and stays warm.

Momence has a lot of these. If your stove goes into the chimney through a hole in the wall and nobody has ever put a camera up the flue, that is the inspection to book.

If this sounds like your house: we handle stainless steel chimney relining across Kankakee County, and our Momence page covers what we usually find there. Call (815) 449-4264, 7am to 9pm, any day.

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