Chimney Sweep, Inspection & Repair in Copiague, NY

Copiague is a post-war neighbourhood: capes, ranches, high-ranches and split-levels built in the 1950s and 1960s, most of them with a single brick chimney serving the boiler and, often, a fireplace. Three things about that combination shorten the life of a chimney here.

Salt air and bay wind

The Great South Bay is about a mile south of Oak Street. Salt-laden air corrodes galvanized caps and chase covers years ahead of schedule and keeps masonry damp longer than it stays damp inland. When that water is sitting in mortar joints and the temperature crosses freezing, which it does dozens of times each Long Island winter, the water expands and pushes the brick apart from the inside. That is spalling, and it is a water problem long before it is a masonry problem.

Oil-to-gas conversions

A large share of South Shore houses have gone from oil heat to gas in the last twenty years while the chimney stayed exactly as built. A high-efficiency gas boiler venting into a wide clay flue designed for oil runs far cooler than that flue expects, so combustion gases condense on the way up instead of leaving. The result is acidic moisture eating the flue from the inside, invisible from the ground, until a liner is the only fix. If your heating system was upgraded and the chimney was not looked at since, that is the inspection worth booking first.

Nor’easters and wind-driven rain

Coastal storms hit exposed chimney faces at an angle a normal rain never does. A cracked crown, a missing cap or a lifted flashing that would drip in Westchester pours on the South Shore. Every inspection we do here ends with a look at the weather side: crown, cap, flashing and the top three courses of brick.