Chimney repair in Andover, MN

Brick: the crown, then the joints, then the brick

On the older Andover houses the chimney is brick, and it fails from the top down. The crown cracks, water gets into the joints under it, the joints wash out, and then the brick faces start coming off. Every step of that is a bigger job than the one before it. A poured crown with an overhang and a drip edge stops it at the start.

Sided chase: the top, then everything under it

On a lot of the newer ones the chimney is a framed box with siding on it and a metal cover on top. When that cover or the storm collar around the pipe stops shedding water, the water goes onto the flue pipe and into the framing. By the time it shows up on the ceiling it's in the framing and the drywall too, so the cover, the collar and the flashing get looked at on every one of these we inspect.

Brick or sided? How to tell from the driveway

Stand back far enough to see the whole chimney. If it's brick or stone all the way up, with a concrete slab on top and clay or metal flue pipes sticking out, it's masonry. If it's covered in the same siding as the house, with a flat or peaked metal cover on top and a round cap in the middle, it's a framed chase around a factory-built fireplace. Knowing which one you have tells Kari what we're coming out to look at, and it's the first thing she'll ask.

A whole town of chimneys the same age

When a town builds half its houses in a twenty-year stretch, the chimneys all start aging at once. A 1995 house has had thirty winters on its chimney and a 2005 house has had twenty. That's the age where caulk at the storm collar has dried out, where a thin factory crown or a mortar cap on brick shows its first crack, and where the liner in a fireplace that's been burned for two decades deserves a camera. None of it is an emergency on its own. It's just the age to have somebody actually go up and look, instead of waiting for a stain.

What 92 freeze-thaw days a winter does in Andover

The NOAA weather station called Andover 1N sits about two miles from the middle of town. Over the eight complete winters it recorded between 2015 and 2023, it averaged 92 days a winter where the high got above freezing and the low dropped below it. That's the number that matters for a chimney. On every one of those days, snow melting on the crown soaks into whatever crack or open joint it can find in the afternoon, then freezes and pushes that night. The station at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport averaged 70 over roughly the same years, so an Andover chimney goes through a lot more of that than one in the city.

Seven months of freeze season

The same Andover station logged about 33 nights a winter at zero or colder. Its first freeze came around October 10 in a typical year and its last one around May 13. On brick, seven months of that is how a hairline crack in a crown turns into loose brick in a few winters. On a sided chase, it's how a little water sitting on the cover becomes rust, and the rust becomes a leak you find next to the fireplace.

Chimney inspection in Andover

On a brick chimney we look at the crown for cracks, the mortar joints above the roofline, the flashing where the chimney meets the shingles, and the clay tiles inside the flue with a camera. On a sided chase we look at the cover, the storm collar, the flashing, the siding around the base of the chase, and the metal flue and its liner all the way down. Every flue that shares the chimney gets looked at, the fireplace, the wood stove, and the furnace or water heater if they vent into it, and you get the pictures by email.

What our inspections actually turn up

We've done 773 chimney inspections since 2022, and 328 of them found enough that the homeowner came back to us for a repair. On brick chimneys, 189 of the 234 repair scopes we've written included the crown. On factory-built chimneys, 60 of 84 included the liner. Those are our numbers across every town we've worked, not Andover's alone. Andover has plenty of both kinds of chimney, so both numbers apply here.

Chimney sweep in Andover

The sweep comes with the inspection. We don't sweep a chimney without inspecting it, and when the inspection finds more than an eighth of an inch of buildup in a flue, that flue gets swept the same visit. A family-room fireplace that gets lit on a few weekends can go a while without much, and a wood stove that runs every night in January can build more in one season than that fireplace does in years. The inspection tells you which one you've got, so you're not guessing.