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HeatShield®

Why Heatshield® May Be the Answer to Relining Your Chimney

HeatShield® is known for efficiently correcting hidden dangers in your chimney liner. When the clay liner in older chimneys cracks, it allows smoke, embers, CO and sometimes fire to escape through the liner into the ceilings and attic space of your home. You can imagine what can happen once these substances leak into those areas.

One of the only options you would have had until now is to replace the entire chimney liner with a stainless steel liner that is both costly and time consuming. With HeatShield® you now have the option of restoring your chimney’s clay flue liner instead rebuilding or relining.

Does Your Chimney Need Relined?

How do you find out if your liner has these dangerous issues? The answer is to make sure you get a thorough inspection. This should include running a camera up through the chimney liner and closely inspecting the walls of the liner itself. Through this process we are able to see the details that reveal those hidden dangers that hide in the walls.

Here are some of the more common issues we find:

  • Deteriorated mortar between clay flue liners
  • Cracked clay liners
  • Spalled clay flue liners or tiles (flaking)
  • Eroded clay liner
  • Gaps and holes between flue tiles
  • Cracked flue tiles

Why We Offer the Heatshield® Method

Though our number one reason for offering the HeatShield® option is for safety purposes, we’d also like to note that it helps to drastically improve efficiency too. Those small gaps and cracks allow excess air into your chimney, slowing the updraft and making it harder for smoke and gas to rise up and out. That means that the fireplace, wood stove, or furnace will perform poorly, resulting in the loss of heat and efficiency.

According to the Chimney Safety Institute of America, (CSIA.org), “problems such as gaps, cracks and spalling (flaking) in your chimney’s flue can present serious risks to your home and family, because your chimney can no longer perform its intended function, which is to safely contain and vent the products of combustion to the outside of your home.”

The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) states,“If the flue liner in a chimney has softened, cracked or otherwise deteriorated so that it no longer has the ability to contain the products of combustion (i.e., heat, moisture, creosote, and flue gases), it shall be removed and replaced, repaired or relined…” NFPA 211-Standard for Chimneys, Fireplaces, Vents and Solid Fuel-Burning Appliances (2006).

Once the HeatShield® has been applied, it will restore the integrity of your chimney flue liner to vent the hazardous gases out of your home the way your chimney is supposed to.

When Chimney Liners Deteriorate

As you can see, the two major organizations, CSIA and NFPA, are well aware of the issues caused by allowing the deterioration of a chimney’s liner. It’s also written into the building codes and fire standards that chimneys should be structurally sound, durable, smoke tight and capable of conveying flue gases to the outside completely and safely. This is not just about new construction but any residential or commercial structure that is fitted with a fireplace, wood stove or furnace appliance of any type.

Every property owner should start with an inspection to find out if this is something they even need to worry about. Most of the time, chimneys that have been properly maintained are fine unless something has happened to damage it outside of normal use. This could include weather incidents, tree damage or, on occasion ,damage done by animals, including birds and rodents.

Having the option to restore your chimney with HeatShield® gives you and us a great way to restore function for safety and efficiency without the added hassles of rebuilding the chimney with a new liner. If you feel this might be something you want to look at, please let us know. There are many families in the Middle Tennessee areas that no longer use their fireplaces because they have not had an affordable way to restore it to work properly. Ashbusters would like to have the chance to see if this new process can restore your fireplace so you can enjoy it once again.

 

If you need more information on chimney relining, Ashbusters has a complete section for common chimney repairs under the services for chimneys and dryer vents.