Your chimney crown is the most vulnerable part of your chimney. Typically made of concrete or metal it protects your chimney from rain and snow. Overwhelmingly most masonry chimneys are crowned with left over mortar and sand and routinely last about 5 to 7 years. The deterioration can begin almost immediately as the mortar cap dries. The small cracks can soon turn into large cracks and allow rain to soak in. this water migrates to the smoke shelf where it mixes with creosote and ashes to form caustic lye. This will leach into the firebox first through the back wall and eat the mortar away. This then can eventually allow flames from the fire to escape the firebox.

Is yours in bad shape?  Run the tip of a screwdriver along the mortar joint in back of the fireplace below. A very telling proof is mortar misssing from between the firebrick in the fireplace. Also if it is just crumbly that means water is probably getting in to the fireplace. If only dust comes off and your mortar looks good you are probably in good shape.  Also adding to the problem is the intense heat produced and then absorbed by the back firewall over time.

When you burn a fire you will never be able to avoid mortar deterioration because it will not last forever. The best way to prolong the life of your firebox is to install one of our heat reflecting shields. They not only offer protection to the back firewall-they project about 30-40% more heat back into the room. It is a great addition to a fireplace for protection and better heating.

A deteriorated back wall becomes a dangerous situation as the missing mortar can allow flames to get to areas of the home it should not be in.

I often relate a story that happened back in 1982. I cleaned a chimney and found the crown in a serious state of disrepair. I told the homeowner about the need for a $100 repair job which she thought was too much and decided to save the money and neglect the warning. About four years later I got a call one night during a severe rain storm from the former customer. She said her house was filling with water coming from the fireplace. I reminded her of the repairs I recommended four years earlier. The phone went silent. Their chimney had failed completely and flooded their house with rainwater. It cost $20,000 to fix; I am sure that $100 savings looked awfully small then. We don't give warnings for nothing.

With each recommendation we make to customers, we not only tell you of the problems we have found, we take pictures and show you. We want to instill your trust in us by showing you exactly what we found.

Below are examples of our work. The first one on the left was done by a local chimney "pro" and failed after only two years. On the right is our repair which carries a 15 year guarantee.

We haven't shown all crown repairs we've done over the years, but these will give you an idea of how your chimney will look once we have done the work. Our repairs are guaranteed to last many years.

We use CrownCoat for most repairs because it is a flexible waterproof sealant that looks like normal cement when dry but remains tough as the weather changes. Unlike ordinary mortar and sand which is used on 99% of the chimneys around, this is a latex based formula that withstands the ravages of Texas weather. It applies at the consistency of gritty cake icing. CrownCoat is a good produce to put on a good chimney crown in order to prevent the cracks from forming.