Santa's Friend Chimney Service Blog

Protecting Your Home from Creosote Build-Up

At this time of year, when fireplace use is finally slowing and coming to a halt, creosote buildup raises two issues. First, whatever creosote is inside your flue, contact with moisture is going to make the fumes it produces much worse. Secondly, simply shutting those smells out of your house by closing the damper does not solve the greater issue.

Image courtesy of Dennis Lamb, Owner, The Mad Hatter Chimney Service in Indianapolis, IN.

Build-Up Stinks

Generally speaking, when you can smell something inside your house, it is time to really do something about it! For many of us, the solution is to throw the smelly item away or clean up the mess. However, a smelly chimney is just a bit more involved.

Many of us like to be able to use the chimney as the vent it is. That means a damper left open and a cap on top which naturally improves the chimney’s draft and keeps water out. Neither one is safely possible with creosote buildup greater than ¼” of SOOT or 1/8^” of later stage creosote.

…And It’s Bad For Your Chimney’s ‘Skin’

Every chimney cap will do a lot to keep wind gusts that cause downdrafts out of your chimney. It makes no sense at all, however, to cap a flue that contains unacceptable amounts of creosote. The longer that creosote stays in your flue, the more damage it does, which is the second type of harm you need to prevent.

Not only does creosote emit toxic fumes, unnecessarily exposing you to harmful carbon monoxide, but it is corrosive. Furthermore, the greater its accumulation, the more difficult it is to remove and the more dangerous it becomes. Protecting your home from creosote build-up means not allowing it to accumulate to any significant amount. When buildup is noticed, it is time to call a CSIA certified chimney sweep to take care of this problem.

Always Have a Plan of Escape

Was it Colin Powell who pointed out the importance of knowing how you get out before you go in? Whether it’s called an “exit strategy” or an “escape plan”, it is critical to the survival of loved ones regardless of where the fight is. No different than being on a battlefield, facing fire, every family needs to plan and train for their own escape and leave the fight to pros.

Fight Fire with Smoke

Working smoke detectors properly placed can save both your family and your house if you have a good escape plan. It is a tiny fraction of children who cannot be awakened from deep sleep by traditional smoke alarms. Nonetheless, if your child is among them, you need to know, so check it out a few times.

Indeed, the more realistic the practice for an actual escape, the more likely it is to kick in when needed. The presence of that shrill beeping from smoke detectors needs to be familiar rather than something that causes panic. Children who do not wake to them need to be assigned to adults who reliably are, and the plan may have to be re-designed.

Time Is Of the Essence

When the alarms sound, getting the whole family out of the house within 5 minutes at most is the goal. Smoke detectors are extremely sensitive, so they are an essential early warning system.  With a good escape plan that has been well practiced, all family members can get safely out and take the pets with them.

It is important to think about family pets, because all too often they are the reason for someone going back into a burning house. This should never be done; get out and stay out, and let firefighters handle the rest. Plan in advance for all of your loved ones to safely escape from the house, and make the 9-1-1 call a part of the plan. If you need any help putting a plan together, please give us a call in Jackson, MS.

The Recent Time Change and Your Smoke Detectors

The recent time change for Daylight Savings was more than a reminder to set your clocks forward 1 hour. It was also a reminder that smoke detector batteries should be periodically changed. Advised to use our twice-yearly time changes to keep up with battery strength, homeowners tracking spring’s special occasions and tax return deadlines sometimes forget. Since it really is a good idea for home safety, we thought it worth bringing forward for new attention now that April Fool’s is past.

Why Bother Now?

Smoke and carbon monoxide detectors save lives, but not if their batteries are not good. In addition,  knowing their condition is not easy. If there is any uncertainty about a battery’s remaining life, it should not be in a smoke or gas detector. Remove it and put it in something less essential to safety, like an extra flashlight or a backup alarm clock.

Getting the last possible drop of juice out of every battery is not a great idea when the batteries are in life-saving alarms. All the statistics point to the costly dangers of undetected smoke and toxic gases, with high public awareness now of carbon monoxide in particular. Yet, those inexpensive batteries tend to be things about which we entrust too much confidence in both big-name and unknown brands.

Extend Lives Another Way

How many homeowners really check how many hours their batteries last or at what point their strength has diminished to unacceptable? More and more homeowners with a taste for short-term savings have switched to ‘house wine’ batteries, coming from who knows where. It is incredibly sad but true that spending a few more cents on each battery might save lives.

So, replace them sooner rather than later, and they can still be used in dozens of other common household items where if a battery dies it is literally not a matter of life and death. Children’s toys, gaming devices, phone bases, bike lights; there are any number of things that you can put used batteries into. Performing too important a function, your carbon monoxide and smoke detectors are not the place for them, so it really is time to change them.

Common Causes of Fire in Your Home

Understanding the common causes of home fires leaves every homeowner and apartment dweller better prepared to prevent them. In some cases, a schedule of routine inspections and cleanings by certified professionals can minimize the clearest dangers. In others, a correction of all-too-common bad habits is required to safeguard the home from unintended fire.

The most common five pieces of the home safety puzzle that are most likely to cause a problem are:

1. the chimney
2. the kitchen stove
3. the clothes dryer vent
4. grills and fire pits
5. kids and pets

Kids and Their Parents

Kids are not the only ones who play with fire, adults do it every time they light a fire beneath a dirty chimney. Grown-ups are careless too at times, firing up patio grills on windy days and walking away from stoves. They toss cigarette butts off balconies and build fires too big to be contained by the pit that is too near a low-hanging branch.

Either carelessness or neglect is almost always behind a fire and adults are usually the ones responsible. Nonetheless, children intentionally play with fire and they unintentionally come too close to it, putting themselves and the home at risk. Lighters, matches, flammable fluids and igniters need to be kept well out of reach, as do burning candles.

Carelessness in Common

The fire dangers posed by neglected chimneys and clothes dryer vents are fairly well known and can be substantially reduced with regular cleanings. Renters need to ask their landlords to clean their chimneys and vents, and homeowners need to talk to their sweeps. Regardless of whether it’s a homeowner’s own or someone else’s, carelessness is what is usually behind chimney and vent fires. Don’t let your home be the next preventable tragedy!

Common Tools of Fire Safety

A smoke detector designed to detect both smoke and carbon monoxide is far and away the most important tool of fire safety. Anyone who has forgotten to open a damper and then walked into another room knows that these sensitive alarms detect smoke long before our noses do. Odorless invisible carbon monoxide is even more dangerous, and it can build up in poorly performing flues that fail to vent smoke properly.

A single-use fire extinguisher kept near but away from likely sources of fire is another common sense fire safety tool. A common mistake is putting the extinguisher too close to the fireplace or stove, forcing homeowners to reach through dancing flames for it. An extinguisher should be handy but beyond the likely range of a possible fire, and everyone in the home should know how to use it.

Fire Safety Tools Should Be Household Words

A bucket of sand and a shovel are never a bad idea for a fireplace hearth and can be attractive decorative items as well. If sand is a problem, that is no reason to toss out the bucket; an empty one helps in cleaning the fireplace by giving a place for the ashes, also improving fire safety.

A fireplace screen belongs among common tools of fireplace safety as well, and for more than one reason. A decorative screen prevents sparks from flying out of the fireplace to set fire to a newspaper or carpeting. It also prevents children from coming dangerously close to the fire, hypnotized by curling flames and glowing embers.

Heads, It’s The Phone Book…

To round out the top five fire safety tools, we are torn between a fire retardant surround for fireplaces and a phone book. The first is definitely a good idea, but the second can put you in touch with a chimney sweep. Having your chimney professionally swept is absolutely critical to fireplace safety, so we are going with the phone book, but keep them away from the fire!

A Pre-Fire Lighting Checklist: Get it Right Before You Ignite!

Following a simple checklist will ensure that the first use of your fireplace this season does not ignite more than you intend:

• Have your chimney professionally inspected.
• Open the glass doors of your fireplace 30 minutes ahead of time.
• Make sure your damper is open.
• Clear the area around the fireplace of newspapers and other combustible materials.
• Check the draft of your chimney with a match.

The first of these is obviously the most important, as it means assurance from a professional that your chimney is clean and in good working order. Until it is, a fire simply cannot be started, as it threatens not only further damage but your health and safety as well. Once your chimney has been certified to be good to go, you can begin your pre-fire check.

Opening the glass doors of your fireplace for thirty minutes before lighting the fire will give it a chance to reach room temperature. Cold air is heavier than hot air, so it sinks down the chimney from outside and gets trapped behind the doors. Opening them will allow the warmer air from the house into the fireplace and begin the movement of air up the chimney.

At one time or another, most homeowners and even apartment dwellers have watched their living room fill with smoke. In all likelihood, this is because they failed to check the damper before starting the fire and the smoke had no access to the chimney. Unless your damper has been permanently fixed in an open position, it should be checked every time you light a fire.

The area around the fireplace is not a good place to stack magazines and newspapers waiting to be clipped or recycled. Embers flying out of wood burning fireplaces seem to seek these out, and they provide fast igniting fuel. Unless a house fire is on your bucket list, paper, cardboard, and highly flammable materials should be stored elsewhere, preferably out of the house.

Finally, you should check the draft of your chimney before starting the fire. Light a match and hold it beneath the flue, watching to see in which direction the smoke travels. If it is coming down and back towards you, something may be obstructing the chimney, with small animals not timing their nest-building to avoid inspections. If the chimney is clear, the draft may just need a little help from a fire starting brick.