Working with electricity and felling trees are things you need to have a lot of knowledge to do. Even chainsawing by itself can be dangerous if you don't take precautions and know what you're doing. But unless you are afraid of heights or ladders, have a really steep roof, or an unusually complicated layout, cleaning your chimney is neither hard nor complicated. I am baffled by the fellow suggesting we are somehow foolish if we attempt this by ourselves. I would place it somewhere between the difficulty of mopping a floor and painting a wall of your house. This isn't rocket science!
I have been up on the roof of all three of the houses we have owned, multiple times on each roof. First house, reshingled it. Second house, patched a leaky skylight, cleaned the gutters, removed an antenna, and caulked something. This house, well as kids we went on it just for fun, now we have been up to clean gutters, prune limbs of trees, paint, caulk, and cover the old masonry chimney. What's the big deal if your roof isn't unusually steep? I would say chimney cleaning is about on a par with changing the oil in your car. About as hard, takes about as long, and you have the potential to get just as messy.
We had an alleged professional sweep our chimney the first time. Hubby and I had both read about how to do it and figured we would do it most of the time. However, we thought at least once we would observe to be sure we did everything right. Just our luck, the guy was a lazy moron. Came 2+ hours late, so I couldn't even be there to observe (or yell at him!) Didn't take apart the stovepipe at all, swept all the soot and crud INTO our stove. If you know the design of a Hearthstone Phoenix, you know that one can't access where the pipe leaves the stove from inside the stove. You have to take the pipe off. So he poked in places where there is fragile insulation and ceramic baffles, got out hardly any of the crud, and mucked up our stove good. Fortunately, the next day I asked hubby something about how the stovepipe went back together. He said the guy didn't take it apart. We thought that very strange, and disassembled it ourselves. The place where the pipe went into the stove was almost completely blocked with a mound of soot! So this 'professional' set us up for trouble, and we were lucky we took it apart before we lit a fire.
A few angry phone calls later and he came back and actually took the soot out of the stove. He said he hadn't disassembled the stovepipe since normally he "didn't need to." Our stove did not burn as well afterwards, looks okay but doesn't heat the house as well. Am worried he tore the insulation or cracked the supposedly delicate thermo-ceramic baffle pieces while he was futiley poking at the soot from the door opening, or maybe just got soot stuffed into some air passage, dunno. We really wish we HADN'T called him, and had just done it ourselves.
