Chimney repair in Ham Lake, MN

Tall chimneys take the worst of it

A chimney that stands four, six or eight feet above the roof to clear the ridge gets weather on all four sides. The sun bakes one face while the other stays frozen. It isn't unusual for the top three or four feet of a tall chimney to be shot while everything below the roof is fine. Rebuilding that top section takes staging and real masonry, and it's what we do.

Chimneys that run all winter

If you heat with wood, the chimney moves every day it's hot, and any joint that's started to go gets worked a little wider. That's why the crown and the top courses on a chimney that burns all winter need looking at more often than one on a fireplace you light at Christmas.

What happens to your yard and roof while we work

A tall chimney gets real staging, planks and brackets on the roof or a scaffold tower from the ground, so nobody is working off a ladder leaned on your gutter. Old brick and the broken crown come down in buckets, not off the edge of the roof, and we tarp the ground at the base. When we leave, the only thing that should look different is the top of the chimney.

Houses that sit out in the open

85% of Ham Lake's homes are single-family houses standing on their own, and a lot of them sit on big lots without neighbors close enough to block the wind. A chimney out in the open gets rain driven into it sideways, and the side that faces the weather opens up years before the side that doesn't. That's why we photograph all four sides, not just the one you can see from the driveway.

Two building booms, two kinds of chimney

Ham Lake built 21% of its houses in the 1970s and another 45% between 1990 and 2009. The 70s houses are mostly brick, and those chimneys are fifty years in, which is when the crown and the top courses give up. The 90s and 2000s houses have a mix of brick and factory-built chimneys, and at twenty to thirty years the flashing, the cap and the liner are what we look at hardest.

The freeze and thaw a Ham Lake chimney lives through

The closest NOAA station with a good record is Andover 1N, about five miles west of Ham Lake. In the eight complete winters it logged from 2015 to 2023, it averaged 92 days a winter that went above freezing in the afternoon and below it at night. The Minneapolis-St. Paul airport averaged 70 over roughly the same stretch. Every one of those days, water that got into the top of the chimney freezes and gets a little bigger. On a tall chimney that stands in the wind, the top courses see that on every face.

Cold enough to crack a crown

That station also averaged about 33 nights a winter at zero or colder, with the first freeze around October 10 and the last around May 13. A crown that was poured thin and flush with the brick holds water on top instead of throwing it off, so it takes that whole seven months head on. A crown with an overhang and a drip edge sheds it. That one detail is most of the difference between a crown that lasts and one that cracks early.

Chimney inspection in Ham Lake

On a tall brick chimney we check the crown, the top six or eight courses closely, the mortar joints on all four sides, the flashing, and the flue tiles with a camera the whole way down. On a stove or insert we look at the liner, the connection at the top of the stove or insert, and the cap. If the furnace or water heater vents into the same chimney, those flues get looked at too. You get every picture by email and a written report.

What we find on chimneys like these

Across every town we've worked, 162 of the 234 brick repair scopes we've written called for rebuilding the top or dealing with brick faces coming off. The cap came up in 68 of 418 repair scopes, and creosote or glaze in 27. Those are company-wide numbers, not a Ham Lake count. But a tall brick chimney that stands out in the weather is exactly the kind that ends up in the first group.

Chimney sweep in Ham Lake

If your wood stove or insert runs a lot of the winter, the chimney should get inspected every year, before the burning season. The sweep comes with that inspection. We measure the buildup in each flue, and anything over an eighth of an inch gets swept the same visit. We don't sweep without inspecting, because the sweep only tells you the flue is clean. The inspection tells you whether it's sound.

What burns clean and what doesn't

Dry, split hardwood that's sat a year burns hot and leaves a lot less behind than wet wood or a fire that's been choked down to smolder overnight. If we find glaze or heavy buildup, we'll tell you what's causing it, because the fix is usually in how the stove is being run and not only in the brush.