With a tip of his top hat and a twirl of his tailcoat, black-clad chimney sweep Bill Gilchrist announces himself. He appears like a puff of whimsy in the midst of work-a-day Lake County. Gilchrist poses at the front door of one of six Barrington homes whose chimneys he’ll clean this sunny fall day.
Traditional wire-bristled brushes, tools, extension poles and ladders await in Gilchrist’s capped pickup truck, emblazoned with its No-Mess Chimney Sweep emblem.
But also stowed in the truck is high-tech, computerized gear that Bert, the chimney sweep in the “Mary Poppins” story, would have thought was the stuff of fairy tales: high-powered chimney vacuums, video cameras, work uniforms, safety ropes, soot suits (head-to-toe disposable outfits for super-sooty jobs), elbow-length leather gloves, goggles, hoods and respirators.
Respirators? How prosaic. Yes, respirators, and not just face masks either. Today’s most technologically oriented sweeps wear high-powered air purifiers: a lightweight disposable, poly-coated hood attached to a turbo unit powered by a rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery pack worn on the belt. Sweeps have come a long way from pulling stocking caps over their faces to protect themselves from the harmful elements found in tar, soot and smoke.
After greeting the homeowner, Gilchrist retires to his truck, where he undergoes a Bert-to-spaceman transformation and steps out ready to sweep.
His change of clothes represents the seriousness of the task. Sweeps are covered head to toe with lore, but after even occasional use chimneys are covered floor to roof with creosote that can catch fire and take the whole house with it.
Gone are the happy-go-lucky chimney sweeps of legend and film. Today’s sweeps trust technology and training rather than luck to clean chimneys and survive the hazards.
And the hazards are very real not only for the sweeps but for the chimney owners.
John Hall, assistant vice president for fire analysis and research for the not-for-profit National Fire Protection Association, in Quincy, Mass., said 1991 figures show that one in six home fires related to a heat source, or 14,900, started in chimneys. That figure is down dramatically from the 59,600 in 1981. He attributed the decrease to prevention, such as performed by sweeps.
“All the fire safety organizations have been emphasizing education in fire prevention, and using chimney sweeps is part of that,” he said. “The kinds of problems they deal with are heavily involved in fire prevention.”
He added, “People took a generation to get used to wood-burning fires as a heat source again.”
Much of the one to two hours that sweeps spend at each house consists of lugging vacuums, brushes, tarpaulins, ladders and gear in and out.
Gilchrist said he calls his business “No Mess” because that’s his promise.
First he spreads the fireside with disposable plastic dropcloths or washable tarps. Then he fits together two or more of his 12 brushes to match the flue size, plugs in his vacuum, dons his safety gear and commences to “scrub” the chimney from the bottom up.
With long extension poles, sweeps can brush a long way up a chimney while lying face-up in the cooled-down hearth.
Then they go to the housetop with ladders, safety ropes and brushes to check the chimney pot for cracks and rid the upper chimney of soot and bird and animal nests.
Time on the roof depends on how thorough the homeowner wants the inspection, the type and height of the chimney and the severity of the soot.
Prices for inspection and cleaning vary with the complexity of the job and the completeness of the inspection, usually between $60 and $80.
“There are three questions homeowners should ask chimney sweeps,” said Chris Larson, 39, owner of Tom’s Chimney Sweep Service in Schaumburg. “Are you certified? Do you have insurance? May I have some references?”
Larson is a certified sweep and has been in the business for six years. “I learned from a previous sweep,” he said, “then became certified through the Chimney Safety Institute of America,” the only group that certifies chimney sweeps.
Larson runs three trucks with four sweeps who also are certified. Though none of Larson’s crews has ever found leftover presents from Santa in chimneys, they have found the usual nests, birds, animals and creosote, especially from unseasoned wood.
“Folks should only burn hard, seasoned wood that’s been dead around one year,” Larson said. “Order wood now for next year and stack it out back, then you’ll be sure.”
“I’m indebted to Chris Larson and his knowledge about chimneys and fires,” said Dale Kuester of unincorporated Palatine. “My wife and I had a chimney fire about two weeks before Christmas last year. We had lit the fire and were just settling in when we heard this roaring sound. I ran outside in the snow barefoot and saw sparks and flames shooting out the chimney. Within a 10-minute span it was over. The fire department came out with everything they had. They checked the roof and attic and told us to get the chimney inspected. They said it’s the second or third fires that do house damage. People usually aren’t aware of fires the first or second time.
“I called Chris of Tom’s Chimney Sweep Service for an inspection,” Kuester said. “He determined we had no structural damage but an extensive buildup of creosote. We’d had the chimney cleaned when we moved in three years before, but we burn two to three full cords of wood a winter. So now we get the chimney cleaned every year.”
The basic task of a chimney sweep is to clean creosote from chimney flues. Creosote is the highly flammable residue that results from burning wood and wood products. Creosote builds up faster in fireplaces where there is lack of sufficient air for combustion, where soft woods such as pine are burned regularly, where the fireplace is used to burn trash or where certain types of artificial logs containing waxes are burned repeatedly.
Good sweeps also will check for damage in the flashing where the chimney meets the roof, for cracks in the chimney liner as well as above and below the roof line. The sweep will check for debris on the smoke shelf, check the damper and either repair the damage if qualified or refer the homeowner to a qualified repair person.
For some chimney sweeps, the business is seasonal, concentrated on late summer, fall and early winter. Those who also rebuild, repair and reline chimneys are kept busy year-round.
Larry Fabian of Fox Lake owns Fabian Chimney Service and doesn’t wear a top hat and tails while working. “Most professional sweeps don’t wear the outfit,” said Fabian, 54.
“Sweeps should be believable, especially if there’s a problem in the chimney. But I do keep the hat and tails in the van. While on the job, though, I wear coveralls, a baseball cap and a . . . respirator. Those little cloth masks might keep the soot out but not the gases.”
Fabian has been a sweep for 11 years and wears his certification badge from the National Chimney Sweep Guild on his coveralls. For 15 years he had been a tool and die maker, he said, until he lost his job in ’82. Then he saw an article about chimney sweeps in a magazine and decided to launch a new career.
“I don’t make a lot of money,” he said, “but I make a lot of lives last longer. I think that’s why I’m in the business, to save lives.”
Not long ago, Fabian said, he was called by a fellow who said he was getting rain in his chimney. “I put my ladder on the roof and saw bird nests down there,” he said. “I went to the basement and started cleaning the furnace. I took 6 feet of bird nests from his chimney. The water came from the condensation of fuel gases that couldn’t get out through the chimney. He thought it was rain. I’d rather have found those nests than read later on about (the death of) those people in the newspaper.”
Fabian said sweeps commonly find nests, raccoons, squirrels, owls, even live ducks in chimneys-along with cracks. “About 80 percent of the chimneys we inspect need work,” he said. “Common jobs are repairing mortar joints, relining chimneys or simply installing safety covers to keep rain and animals out.”
Fabian uses a chimney-video system to check for cracks. It’s a specialized scanner that’s attached to a fiberglass rod and a centering device. “As I move it up, the homeowner and I view the inside of his chimney together on a (television) monitor. In chimney cleaning, we’ve advanced quite a bit,” he said.
“Of the 6,500 to 6,700 companies of sweeps in the U.S., 800 companies are members of the guild,” said John Bitner, executive director of both the National Chimney Sweep Guild and its educational arm, the Chimney Safety Institute of America in Gaithersburg, Md. “We don’t know how many sweeps are out there, but 1,200 sweeps are certified by us.”
Certification is growing, he said, as homeowners demand it and as insurance companies increasingly look for proof that certified sweeps serviced the chimneys of houses subsequently damaged by fire. Satisfactory completion of a test is required for certification, and a class is offered for those who haven’t studied under another chimney sweep.
“This office is a lightning rod for people with problems,” Bitner said. “There’s the couple who built a fire the first night they stayed in their new house. The chimney caught on fire and their house burned to the ground. Apparently the worker ran out of material to finish the top of the chimney, so he finished with wood (instead of brick). Then there’s the subdivision of 220 homes that all began to catch fire after seven years because of mis-installation of chimneys.
“As a nation we’ve lost touch with chimney safety,” he added. “Our latest figures are from 1990, and they document more than 4,500 residential fires caused by (coal and wood) equipment and chimney fires. As a result, 110 people died, 310 were injured and total property losses were set at more than $200 million.”
“When wood burners were real big, we had more chimney fires,” said Ron Levin, captain and training officer of the Zion Fire Department’s Station No. 1. “But it’s still important to get those furnaces and fireplaces checked. Chimney sweep Larry Fabian gave us a seminar on fireplace safety and chimney fires. It was a good class. Carbon monoxide is the silent killer, you know.”
Stan Johansen, owner of Healthy Hearths in Island Lake, started his chimney-sweep business about a year and a half ago. “I was a superintendent for a large heating and air conditioning concern,” he said. “At 52, I thought it was too stressful and also a good time for a new career. I went to Sioux Falls, S.D., for a study seminar and exam from the Chimney Sweep Guild.”
Pam, Johansen’s wife, runs the company office. “In the past couple of months,” she said, “we had two jobs to clean up after chimney fires. One woman was so scared. She said the fire came roaring right down the chimney and into the house.” After jobs like that, Pam said, her husband comes home pretty dirty.
“He takes his uniform off in the garage or outside somewhere,” Pam said with a laugh. “Often soot streaks his face where the mask didn’t cover and he looks pretty bad. I wash all his uniforms. Physically, his job is pretty demanding. Those ladders are heavy. Sometimes he has to knock a hole in the back of a chimney to dislodge a dead animal, then he repairs the chimney.”
“Sweeping has come a long way for safety,” Johansen said. “You have to have a respirator, masks, gloves and high-powered dust cleaners. But I have a top hat in my truck,” he said with a smile.
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For a list of certified chimney sweeps in Illinois, send a self-addressed, stamped business envelope to the National Chimney Sweep Guild, 16021 Industrial Drive, Suite 8, Gaithersburg, Md., 20877.
