Why Swansea Chimneys Are Really Wood Boxes
If your Swansea (62226) home was built roughly between the 1990s and 2010s, there's a strong chance your "chimney" isn't masonry at all. It's a chase: a wood-framed box, clad in siding, containing a factory-built metal fireplace and its flue pipe. From the street it reads as a chimney. Structurally it's a wall.
That box has to be closed at the top, and the lid is a chase cover — a sheet-metal pan folded down over the edges with a hole for the flue pipe. It is a single sheet of metal doing the job of a roof, and it is the only thing standing between rain and the entire wood structure underneath.
Builder-grade covers are galvanized: ordinary steel with a thin sacrificial zinc coating. On a flat cover water pools instead of running off, the zinc goes first at the low spots, and then the steel underneath starts rusting. Realistic service life in Illinois and Missouri weather: 10 to 15 years. The rust bleeds over the folded edge and streaks down your siding — and by the time you can see that from the driveway, the cover has been failing for a while.
Once water gets past the cover it runs down inside the chase, behind the siding, where nobody can see it. We have opened chases where the sheathing was simply gone. That repair is not $500 — it's $10,000 and up. A stainless cover with a cross-break, installed once, ends the whole story.
We serve the Metro East: Swansea, Belleville, O'Fallon IL, Shiloh, Fairview Heights and Mascoutah.
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Serving all of Swansea, IL (62226) and the surrounding communities. Free written estimate on every job.
