Who We Are

Prospect Heights sits in the middle of the Chicago northwest/north suburbs, Cook and southern Lake County, and the weather here does more damage to chimneys than fire does. Water soaks into brick and crown, freezes, and takes the faces off the brick. Mortar joints open. Crowns crack. Ice dams and wind-driven snow push water past step flashing that was fine ten years ago. Burn season is short here, five or six months, and most households only light a fire on cold evenings and over the holidays, so creosote builds slowly. That means the annual look is usually less about soot and more about what the winter did to the structure, whether the liner is still sound, and whether anything moved in through an open flue. Raccoons, squirrels and nesting birds all use uncapped chimneys, and chimney swifts are federally protected once they nest, so there are warm months where the only correct answer is to wait.

There are two distinct chimney populations in this area and we work on both. Pre-1960 masonry chimneys with clay tile liners serving open fireplaces, and 1970s-2000s homes with factory-built prefab metal fireboxes and Class A pipe running inside a framed chase topped by a sheet-metal chase cover. Natural gas service is universal here, so a large share of the original wood fireplaces have been converted to gas logs or sealed inserts. Those flues make no creosote, but they still need to be checked for draft, liner condition, spillage and blockage. We see Heatilator, Heat & Glo, Majestic, Napoleon, Superior and Empire units regularly. The crew shows up with drop cloths, a vacuum, a rod-and-brush set sized to your flue, and a camera to look up the liner and show you what is actually there. For gas work we bring the tools to pull and clean a burner, check the pilot and thermocouple, and test the unit before we leave. We handle sweeping, chimney inspection, caps, liners, flues, fireboxes and gas fireplace repair. We do not do masonry or brickwork. If the brick itself needs rebuilding we will tell you and point you to someone who does it.

If you only burn a handful of times a year, there is a good chance the flue does not need sweeping yet, and we say so and charge for the inspection instead of inventing work. What moves the number on a sweep here is the chimney itself: a tall two-story masonry flue takes longer than a single-story prefab, a second or third flue on the same stack adds time, heavy glazed creosote from slow smoldering fires needs more than a brush, and an animal nest or a flue packed with debris turns a sweep into a removal job. Gas units take a different kind of time than wood, since the work is cleaning and testing rather than brushing. If the camera turns up a cracked tile, a rusted chase cover or flashing letting water in, that becomes a separate conversation about chimney repair and we walk you through the photos before anyone picks up a tool.