Home heating season is upon us.  In New England and in the hills, we get our share of cold weather.  We heat with oil, but offset our oil usage by running nightly woodstove fires.  That means chimney maintenance-- chimney sweeping.  This post will be in two parts: outside work and inside work.

Chimney sweeping is important for to reasons:

• Efficiency-- I like good, hot burns and that requires good airflow
• Safety-- Burning wood releases chemicals and those create creosote buildup in the chimney.  Too much build up leads to chimney fires

I sweep three times:

• Before season
• Mid season
• After season

The good news is chimney sweeping is a relatively easy DIY project and requires a low time investment.  Here is what is involved:

• Setup-- It takes about 10 minutes to get the ladder and tools in place
• Sweeping-- approximately about 10 minutes to visually inspect, sweep, and reinspect
• Cleanup-- Cleanup is vacuuming the "Crumbs" in at the woodstove and pipe and put everything away

So here's what you need for the outside work (I will address the inside work in a second post):

• Ladder
• Flashlight
• Work gloves
• Dust mask
• Glasses or goggles
• Chimney brush (These are opening size and shape specific-- you need to buy the right size and shape)
• Extension poles for the brush (Measure your chimney height and add a foot or two to get the right number of extenders)

                        

What to do:

• Use the flashlight to identify specific spots of buildup
• Put brush and poles down the chute
• Start "churning the butter" up and down the chimney for a few minutes
• Let the dust settle
• Reinspect the chimney-- repeat the scrubbing if necessary
• Carefully get off the roof

In my next post, I will review the inside work and the cost savings.

This post originally appeared on Self-Reliance-Exchange.com, here is the link to the original post: Sweeping a Chimney (Part 1).

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Website Recommendation: Woodheat.org
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