Chimney Sweep in San Fernando, CA

Frequently Asked Questions

The glass doors on our fireplace are from the original build — repair or replace?

On the 1950s and 60s single-story stucco homes around San Fernando, the doors are usually a bolted-in steel frame with tempered glass panels, and the frame itself is often still sound. If the problem is cracked gasket rope, a sagging or sticking track, loose mesh, or a broken handle, those are repairable and worth doing. Replace when the glass is cracked or heat-clouded, when the frame has rusted through at the bottom rail, or when the masonry opening has shifted enough that the frame no longer seats flat. That last one matters here more than most places, because an opening that's gone out of square is usually telling you something about the chimney above it. On the older 1920s-40s bungalows, odd opening sizes sometimes mean a custom or a careful retrofit rather than an off-the-shelf unit, and we'll tell you which you're looking at before anything gets ordered.

Should I be worried about earthquake damage to my brick chimney?

It's a real inspection item in this city, not a theoretical one. San Fernando sits close to both the 1971 Sylmar and 1994 Northridge epicenters, and a lot of the short clay-lined brick stacks on these homes took shaking they were never engineered for. What we look for: cracked or spalling crowns, top courses separated or leaning away from the stack, flue tiles offset at the joints, and stair-step cracking in the mortar where the chimney passes the roofline. Damage can sit there for decades without a hint of it from inside the house. If you've owned the home since before either quake and have never had the stack looked at from the top, that's the inspection to get.