One of the most important items for keeping your chimney lasting a long time is a proper chimney liner. Without a properly installed chimney liner chimneys can develop deposits of creosote which is a corrosive substance. UL listed stainless steel chimney liners are the best. But chimney liners and chimney flue liners are not the only way to protect your chimney. Chimney covers will help keep unwanted debris and animals out of your chimneys. Did you know that there is a species of bird called the chimney swift? It likes to nest in chimneys, but generally just during the summer months thankfully. But that doesn’t mean that those little devils aren’t going to leave behind debris from their nests that will clog up your chimney. Properly installed chimney covers can put a stop to those little buggers flying down your chimney (or any other curious animals that might head down your chimney chute for a peek around).
Chimney caps, properly installed will protect your chimney from any extraneous debris that might otherwise fall down your chute, but this does seem to come at a price. Since the 1823 poem by Clement Clark Moore, we now know that Santa also uses the chimney to gain entrance to people’s homes and bring all the good little children presents. If everyone has chimney covers installed, then how will Santa ever manage to get all the presents delivered? Well fret not, for I happen to have it on excellent authority that Santa is a special, magical being, who uses a special shrinking powder he keeps is a tiny sack tied around his belt. When Santa sprinkles a small about of the magic powder on himself, he shrinks down to an imaginably small height, and then he makes his decent down the chimney. Once inside, he sprinkles a small bit of growing powder he has in a second sack tied to his belt, and he magically grows back to normal size. So having chimney covers are totally fine for Santa, they won’t trouble him a bit. Neither will chimney liners, which he actually likes to slide down when he enters all the good little children’s homes.
So if you want to keep you chimney around for as long as possible, then make sure you have chimney covers and chimney liners installed in it. Keep the level of corrosives down and the foreign debris (but not Santa) out.
