East Hartford Heating & Cooling goes beyond servicing and repairing your furnaces and a/c systems. We are a company to turn to for chimney liners. If you are thinking to yourself ‘Why should I invest in a chimney liner?’, then read on…
A chimney can be a fire waiting to happen. Hidden by the brick exterior, most chimneys contain a clay or terracotta liner that makes up the innermost membrane of the chimney and helps contain smoke, carbon monoxide, and burning embers produced by the home's fireplace or furnace. Some chimneys have no liner at all, just an aging brick shell.
Over time, the clay liner and brick can deteriorate, leaving the home vulnerable to carbon monoxide poisoning or fire. Harmful creosote, a flammable byproduct of burning wood, can build up on the inside of the chimney or liner and create the potential for chimney fires. Rebuilding the entire chimney liner is one way
to ensure a safer home, but it's also the costliest, and requires extensive demolition to the existing brick. Chimney relining systems are a less costly and less invasive solution.
Liners in chimneys serve three main functions:
1) The liner protects the house from heat transfer to combustibles. In the NBS tests, unlined chimneys allowed heat to move through the chimney so rapidly that the adjacent woodwork caught fire in only 3 1/2 hours.
2) Liners protect the masonry from the corrosive byproducts of combustion. In the tests it was determined that if the flue gases were allowed to penetrate to the brick and mortar, the result would be a reduction in the usable life of the chimney. The flue gases are acidic in nature and literally eat away at the mortar joints from inside the chimney. As the mortar joints erode, heat transfers more rapidly to the nearby combustibles and dangerous gases such as carbon monoxide can leak into the living areas of the home.
3) Liners provide a correctly sized flue for optimum efficiency of appliances. Modern wood stoves and gas or oil furnaces require a correctly sized flue to perform properly. The chimney is responsible for not only allowing the products of combustion a passage out of the house, but the draft generated by the chimney also supplies the combustion air to the appliance. An incorrectly sized liner can lead to excessive creosote buildup in woodburning stoves, and the production of carbon monoxide with conventional fuels.
Although the installation of the liner itself may seem simple, the renovations to the smoke chamber and insulation of the liner can take an additional day or two. While it is possible to do this project on your own, most chimney liner companies strongly recommend that homeowners hire a trained installer. Installing a chimney liner leaves no room for error, as any mistake can easily lead to fire.
