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Most people don’t think about chimney sweeps. When they do, they think of birds that live in chimneys, or of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Those who think of birds are mistaken, as those birds are called Chimney Swifts. However, Van Dyke’s character Bert was, among other things, a chimney sweep.
That’s what Bill Kline was thinking of in 1978 when he started Chim Cheree Chimney Sweep.
The late ’70s and early ’80s were a boom time for chimney sweeps. Oil prices were high and many people were cutting energy costs by buying wood stoves to heat their homes.
Very little was generally known about the physics of chimneys in those days. What was apparent though, was that if you stuck a woodstove in your fireplace and burned it all winter, it made a mess of your chimney. That sticky, gooey mess of creosote was highly flammable and could cause a serious flue fire if not removed. So a lot of new chimney sweeps were needed to meet this new demand.
The men and women that were drawn to the chimney sweeping profession weren’t content to scrape black goo out of chimneys with wire brushes. They wanted to understand how it got there – how to prevent it. They also wanted to find more effective tools to remove it.
So they got together and compared notes. State guilds were formed, then a National Guild. A body of knowledge and research was gathered and continuously expanded. State guilds and the National Guild began certifying that individual sweeps knew that body of knowledge. The Chimney Safety Institute of America was formed to train sweeps and consumers about chimney safety.
Chimney sweeps learned the causes of flue fires. They learned about the nasty, gooey stuff they cleaned out of chimneys. They developed better tools and techniques, methods and procedures. They studied and debated, observed and tested, and passed on their hard won knowledge to newer sweeps.
It’s been 30 years since Bill Kline started Chim Cheree Chimney Sweep. He’s seen the industry develop and mature over the years. He’s played a part in the growth of the industry.
Chim Cheree Chimney Sweep still removes the byproducts of combustion from chimney interiors. But they do much more than that. They understand how a house works as a system, and the chimney’s part in that system. They can tell you why your chimney stinks, why it leaks, why it has ugly black mold growing around the top. They can diagnose smoky fireplaces, dangerous wood stoves, and damaged flues. They can fix almost any problem your chimney has, or can build you a nearly perfect chimney if you haven’t got one.
Best of all, sweeps from Chim Cheree arrive armed with a digital camera and a notebook computer. They document everything they inspect and then sit down with you to give you their opinion of your chimney. They use pictures, diagrams, and small words so that you can understand what they say. This presentation is recorded as a QuickTime movie so you can have an exact record of it.
So what should you think of when you think about chimney sweeps?
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