I can run the fire with the doors open or closed. I had thought that with the doors open it would steal my air from the room and send it up the chimney resulting in a net loss of heat. However I ran it today with the doors open and it really pushes a lot of heat in the room.

Is this simply my impression or it is better to keep the doors open?

The 450-500 for cleaning glazed creosote, if that’s really what I have, may be in line.

What I did not like was the constant up-selling. Assuming I needed a new cap. Assuming I may need a new stainless steel liner. I say show me some cracked tiles. Show me some failing mortar. In the meantime, winter is about done, and I just won’t burn until I get resolution.

I see a lot of the steel liners are flex pipe. Drawing an analogy from car exhaust, you should never, ever use flex pipe on an exhaust manifold or piping for a car if you can avoid it. Show me any performance oriented exhaust header or pipes for a car that has ribs like flex pipe does, and I’ll tell you that’s less efficient and probably all show and no go. Why is it different for chimney flues? Isn’t that another sort of exhaust pipe? The original tile liners did not have ribs/ridges. Why would you put something in that’s going to collect soot and creosote in the ridges? Am I missing something here?

I do think with the downturn in residential building since 2007, there are a lot of unemployed masons or underemployed masons branching out into chimney work.
I had a guy who showed up, saw an admittedly quite dirty chimney, and immediately started talking about replacing the cap for $440 (really? at that price it should be copper with a decorative weather vane). He wanted $450 for the cleaning. But he did not have the equipment, after he showed up two full hours late. WTH? As I understand it, you use a chimney chain whip if you have something the brushes and rods won’t remove. What kind of outfit doesn’t bring that tool with them? Then he wanted to talk about putting a liner in, etc. Every word that came out of this guy’s mouth had a cha-ching cash register sound to it. Then when I talked about re-scheduling, the price had magically gone up to $500. I cut him loose, brushed it myself, hit some areas with a drill attachment, and ran a 750 lumen light down the flue. I still have not burned again, and I am thinking about hitting it with some chain flails.

So is cleaning not recommended? No, if you burn a lot, you gotta clean or risk a devastating fire. If the creosote got glazed on from neglect, that’s very dangerous to leave in place and more time consuing to clean. But some chimney sweeps, especially those who double as masons give the business a bad name. Call around. Get some estimates. Use Angie’s list.

Couple questions though: (1) when cleaning, do you really expect to get down to the original coloration of the flue tile? I.E., where my hot water and gas hvac vent, those flue tiles are remarkably clean. Does a good chimney cleaning really get the flue tiles back to that same terra cotta color? Or realistically, wouldn’t you have some permanent smoke discoloration?
(2) Do the chimney chains run a risk of cracking the flue tiles?

We haven’t had much success cleaning the porous surfaces. Many well meaning suggestions from people who haven’t actually tried them. Have you had success cleaning this? What have you used?

We do clean our chimney regularly.