Chimney cleaning and fireplace repair in Joliet, IL.

The old city grew up on the Des Plaines River and the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and it was built of the local limestone: the prison finished in 1858 was raised entirely from stone quarried in Joliet and Romeoville, and the mansions of the same era stand on Joliet limestone foundations. The houses of the East Side and Upper Bluff historic districts, and the streets around them, carry brick chimneys laid for wood and coal a century and more ago: clay tile liners with open joints or no liner at all, soft brick and lime mortar that take water every spring and freeze every winter, crowns that have shed their mortar a decade at a time. Plenty of those fireplaces have been cold for decades, and the chimney above them has not been looked at since the deed last changed hands.

The new city is the subdivisions that took Joliet from 76,836 people in 1990 to 147,459 in 2010. The builders of those houses put in a factory-built fireplace almost without exception, many of them gas: a metal firebox inside a wood-framed chase, a metal flue up the middle, a chase cover set on top at the end of the job. Metal rusts rather than crumbles: the cover first, then the cap, while twenty or thirty winters crack the firebox panels and age the thermopile under the logs. Rain that gets past a rusted cover follows the outside of the flue down into the wall, unseen until the drywall stains.

A wood fire leaves creosote in the flue and a chimney fire cracks a clay tile or warps a metal one; gas exhaust, which is mostly water, eats at old mortar and liners from the inside. Block that vent, or let it crumble, and carbon monoxide comes back into the house with no smoke to warn anyone. That is the reason behind NFPA 211, the national standard for chimneys and vents, and its yearly inspection whatever the fuel, and the reason the gas unit gets its service on the same drive.

Every part of the work, chimney and fireplace, happens at your Joliet address. The truck takes I-355 south from 75th Street and is in the city in about half an hour in normal traffic. Call (630) 241‑1919 or book online, and say what you burn, when the flue was last swept, and whether the house is old brick near the river or a subdivision house with the builder’s fireplace. For a gas unit that has stopped working, add the make and what changed, and the call-back with a time comes within one business day.

Joliet callers ask first whether we really drive that far, and we do; nothing but the choosing of a new unit happens anywhere except your house. Only the choosing happens at the showroom, and only once the report says the flue can take what you have in mind. Take I-355 north to 75th Street and go east to Lemont Road; we are at 1202-B, with parking at the door, open every day of the week including Sunday afternoon. You see inserts, log sets and doors at their real size, and the electric ones are lit.