Part of our Pomona chimney has been painted. Is that a problem?

It can be. Many paints and coatings slow the rate at which brick dries, and water held behind a film is what pushes brick faces off. Bubbling or peeling paint, or flaking brick under it, is the sign that moisture is trapped. Paint also hides the repair history, so the joints under it are worth looking at before anyone repaints or repoints.

How can I tell whether the flue needs sweeping before this winter?

By how much is in it, not by the calendar. CSIA's Level 1 standard is to sweep, or recommend sweeping, any chimney with an eighth of an inch or more of buildup. A fireplace lit on most cool evenings gets there sooner than one lit a few times a year, and slow, smoky fires from damp wood get there faster still. If the flue is clean, sweeping it is not the job; if you cannot remember when anyone last looked, that answers the question.

Two brick chimneys with round metal caps and mesh screens fitted over clay flue pots

Los Angeles County

Chimney & Fireplace Services in Pomona

Local information for Pomona, CA — what the climate and the housing stock here do to a chimney, and the services that deal with it.

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Pomona, CA

Chimney service in Pomona

Pomona's houses cover a wide range of ages, so the first question about any chimney here is what kind it is and what has already been done to it. Where a house is old, the chimney may have been patched several times by different hands. The inland climate, with hot summers and cool winter nights, then keeps working on whatever mortar ended up in the joints.

What Pomona does to a chimney

On a Pomona chimney that has been repaired before, the useful skill is reading the repairs. Each one leaves a boundary: new brick against old, a gray cement patch against softer original mortar, a painted face over whatever it covered. Pomona sits at the inland end of the county with little marine air, and the hot-summer, cool-night swing moves each of those materials by a different amount, so the boundaries are where cracks tend to open first. A chimney that looks patchy from the street is often telling you about its repair history rather than about one current fault.

Pomona homes and what it means for the chimney

Where a Pomona house has had several owners, the chimney has usually been through several decisions too: gas logs set into a wood-burning firebox, a crown skimmed over, joints filled with whatever mortar was to hand. None of those is necessarily wrong, but each one hides what was there before. Where the original mortar was a soft lime mix, patches in hard Portland cement push the stress into the brick face, which then spalls. Finding out what the joints are actually made of comes before deciding how to repoint them.

Pomona sits in the Pomona Valley, where the dominant chimney risk is thermal cycling, long burn season.

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What this site covers

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Los Angeles County Service Areas
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Common questions

Pomona questions

It can be, depending on what it was patched onto. If the original joints are a soft lime-based mortar, a hard cement patch does not give with them, and the brick beside the patch starts shedding its face over the following seasons. If the chimney was laid in cement mortar to begin with, a matching patch is much less of a concern. The National Park Service brief on repointing historic masonry sets out the principle; which case you have is settled by looking at the joints.

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