Flue inspection / cleaning Sweep or self?

Depending upon your setup, cleaning a chimney is not difficult. Brushes are not expensive nor are the poles you need to reach into the chimney.

My first setup was to buy a brush and then I used some old galvanized pipe (3/4" I think but may even have been 1/2") with couplings and just screwed them together.

At present with our SS chimney, we put the flue straight through the wall and then up. Naturally there is a tee. We can remove the cap at the bottom of the tee for both cleaning and inspection. No light needed to inspect. I simply send my wife out and tell her to check the chimney. lol

All we do is remove the bottom plate from the tee which is held on with two screws. Then we simply look up. Either it is clean or it needs cleaning. If it needs cleaning, we screw on length of pole (we now use fiberglass poles), push that up into the chimney and then screw on the next link, etc. After we reach the top with the brush, we then start down but use a scrubbing action all the way down. After getting all the way down, we then go all the way back up and back down again. Now is inspection time again and we almost always find it very clean.

Having said all that, we have yet to clean our SS chimney that we put up in 2007. Our stove burns so clean that we just don't have a creosote problem. The biggest key to that is burning very dry wood and that is why we have a large wood pile. We simply do not want to burn any unseasoned wood. I believe it pays to do things this way. It saves a lot of work and the stove will give much more heat and is not difficult to get a fire going.

After the burning season is when the stove and the horizontal section of flue gets a good cleaning. We then usually plug the chimney so that birds and/or yellow jackets do not try to take up residence inside the pipe or stove.

A trick I'm thinking of doing is buying poles that are used for large camping tents. It's the same fibreglass as sweep brushes, but instead of screwing together the ends just nest inside each other, faster and easier than screwing together. All the pole sections are held together by shock cord and fold nicely into one bundle. You'd have to rig something up to connect the brush though.

BeGreen said:

We have that setup on our family tent. I don't think I'd trust the shock cords for the pull stroke. It seems the brush would get stuck and then could only be pushed out.

Click to expand...

Yeah I think you're right. If you have a SS chimney with minimal buildup it may work fine, but if you have some scrubbing to do and/or a brick chimney I think the poles would pull apart as you mentioned. I'll have to test this out over the summer and see how it goes.

I agree. You could push the brush, but then how do you pull it back? The fiberglass poles that are sold are not expensive nor is galvanized pipe. Do it right and you won't have a mess.

And if it is just a light glaze it usually is nothing to be concerned with. Our old chimney (we replaced it in 2007) had quite a bit of glaze even down near the bottom and it never was a problem. We just kept the loose stuff cleaned and all was well.

Just had a new stove installed in our 150 year old Cape Cod styled home. The installers swept the existing SS chimney, about 2 cups of coffee ground scrapings. There was about 3/4 inch of frozen rain on the roof at the time and they did a top down sweep! So slippery that I couldn't watch. There is no way that I would do that for the $125 that we were charged. I'll slip off the stove pipe and take a look up periodically but I'll leave the sweeping to pros.

Another tip that I just kinda swerved into - Put a gooseneck lamp with 100w bulb in the cold stove. On mine, I can put bulb into bypass area and when on roof looking down - it illuminates pipe and chimney very well. Plus the heat of the bulb moves soot particles up and out the chimney as I sweep - get quite a cloud out - less to shopvac up from the bypass plate. And you know you're done when the soot particles no longer obscure the bulb as you brush.

^ I lower a drop light down...before and after. Quite helpful.

This is my first season heating my own house with wood, and I've done my own cleaning. We have about 18' of chimney (13' of SS and 5' of double wall stove pipe). The back side of our roof where the SS exits has a relatively gentle slope, so it's easy to walk around up there. I purchased a 6" round poly brush and 18' of rods from Rutland. So far, cleaning has been easy. When I clean, I get probably a cup full of the brown, coffee ground looking stuff. But, I attribute this to burning hot and to burning dry, seasoned wood. The first time you get up there, you're nervous and you wonder if you can do it right, but you soon get the hang of it.