Be Your Own Chimney Sweep
by Corcceigh Green
Homesteaders love being self-sufficient. To sustain our self-sufficient life-styles we provide our own heat for winter months. This is done most often with wood burning stoves and/or fireplaces. After all, you can’t very well think of yourself as self-sufficient if you must rely upon the outside world to keep your home warm. Those of us who choose to live self-sufficiently like to think we can provide for most of our own needs. Since heating is one of those needs, access to a wood lot and a wood burning stove are necessities to homesteaders.
Equipping your home with an efficient wood burning stove will increase your self-sufficiency, but, like when installing any piece of equipment, whether furnace or air conditioning, upkeep and maintenance schedules must be maintained for safety. Burning wood produces heat which keeps the homestead warm. That warm fire also produces smoke. Smoke is not actually a vapor or gas. Smoke is made up of very fine particulates. As these particulates are carried up the chimney they cool and stick to the interior of pipes and chimneys. The particulates are made of burned and unburned resins, ash and potash. The resins form a black, sometimes papery, gob that clings to chimney bricks. This is called creosote.
Over time creosote builds up in the chimney clogging the airway and creating a fire hazard. As creosote builds in your chimney it narrows the airway, constricting and slowing the flow of hot air. This gives the air a greater chance to cool which accelerates the accumulation of creosote. Although creosote is created during the burning process, it is still flammable. Creosote can ignite due to a number of conditions. Many times sparks are carried into the chimney by the flow of hot air. These sparks may become nestled in a pocket of creosote where it will smolder long enough to heat and ignite the creosote. At times, the air from the fire is hot enough to ignite the creosote. If you have allowed a lot of creosote to build up in your pipes or chimney you may be facing an inferno.
Creosote can burn very hot and if there is a lot of creosote that has built up in your chimney a fire can heat the lining and bricks in your chimney so much that the heat will cause your chimney to crack. Heat, fire and sparks easily find their way through such cracks and into the wood frame of the house. Many homeowners loose their homes every year due to house fires caused by chimney fires. Fortunately, there are simple and easy preventive measures to avoid a chimney fire.
To prevent creosote build up, take down your stove and pipes and brush them out with a chimney brush. Clean ash out of your stove thoroughly and inspect the inside for cracked bricks and cracks in the stove’s metal. Cracks in bricks can be repaired with refractory clay. Cracks in the metal can be repaired by brazing or welding. Don’t forget to inspect and clean the stove’s combustion baffle. That’s just the shelf above the fire box.
Older pipes should be replaced as well as pipes that are rusted or have patches that had been burned through. Often those areas will look as though there are a series of pin pricks. You also need to inspect the interior of the chimney. Look for cracks in the lining. Out of line segments in the chimney indicate portions of the chimney has buckled, settled or otherwise fallen out of place. This will restrict air flow and create a shelf where creosote will form and accumulate creating a fire hazard. The more creosote that accumulates in the chimney or pipes, the hotter and longer a fire will burn within the structure increasing the chances of the fire spreading into the wood structure of the home.
An ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure. The prevention for a raging chimney fire spreading to your house and destroying your home is much less than an ounce compared to what you could lose. All it takes is some PVC pipes, a chimney brush and a bolt and some nuts. This arrangement will also allow you to clean a chimney from the ground floor, saving you from climbing onto a slick, icy roof.
If you live in a two story home, you’ll need to buy two, full lengths of one quarter inch PVC pipes and a coupler. Cut a small one inch slit in the end of one PVC pipe. The slit should begin at the end and proceed down toward the other end for one inch. Directly across from the first slit, on the same end of the PVC pipe as the first slit, make another slit. Your chimney brush will have a loop on one end. The slits should be made as wide as the width of the wires making the loop. Not as wide as the diameter of the loop. Between the slits, about half an inch from the edge drill a hole about an eighth of an inch in diameter. Drill another hole directly across from this hole.
Tie a length of clothes line to the loop and slide the clothes line down the inside of the PVC pipe. Place the loop of the chimney brush into the slits in the pipe and run a one eighth inch diameter bolt through both holes in the pipe, attaching the brush to the pipe.
This brush and shaft is flexible and can be inserted into a chimney system that takes a right angle bend to rise upwards to the roof. To use the brush, push the brush and shaft into the ground floor chimney opening. If you encounter a right angle bend, reach your hand into the chimney opening and guide the brush upward into the chimney while pushing the shaft into the opening.
Should your home have two stories and your chimney extend further than a length of PVC pipe, you can make the pipe longer by attaching a coupler and adding another length of pipe. Make certain that the rope attached to the brush’s loop extends through the pipe so that you can pull the brush and other pipe back down should the couple fail and the pipe come apart. Such a situation would leave the brush stuck in the chimney unless you could pull on the safety rope to retrieve it.
Sweeping your chimney and maintaining your stove and fireplace are necessary tasks in running your homestead. Being your own chimney sweep will prevent tragedy and mishap and with the setup described above, doesn’t take a lot of effort.
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