Rotary Chimney Cleaning Tools?

[wesmann]

It might be time to stop climbing to clean my chimney. I've seen adds for a chimney cleaning tool with something like a weed wacker head on a flexible rod driven by a drill. Has anyone used one? I'll have to go in through the chimney thimble into an 8x10 flue and up about twenty feet. Thanks for any info.

 

[PILOON]

I seem to recall that there is also an ultrasound cleaning process being used.

 

[brutus54]

Wesmann, our log cabin has a very steep roof pitch and that is how we get it cleaned. They take off the clean out plug at the bottom of the pipe and just add sections to reach the top. Then they take the pipe off the stove and go through the wall to the chimney pipe, and the pipe from stove with 2 90deg elbows is laid out on the grass and cleaned. They have used fiberglass rods as well as flexible steel rods.

 

[RalphVa]

I used some old tire chains, connected together (e.g. 2 sets of chains). Just run them around the outside of the chimney. Vacuumed out the stuff from the bottom inside the house. Had a wood stove in the basement of the NJ house, and the Vt house was heated by a leaky stove. Never had anything from the Vt house but plenty of stuff knocked down in the NJ pipe. These were pipes, not chimneys, but chimneys are usually lined with a relatively smooth pipe inside.

 

[oosik]

When we built our log cabin I installed a "cleanout T". Uses the old style bristle brush on many fiberglass extension rods. Rod the vertical - rod the horizontal. Open the "T" and remove the residue.

Did this every fall. It was the one time we brought the shop vac to the cabin. Suck up the mess.

Never had much carbon build-up in the chimney. Maybe because the only wood we burned was birch. The birch on our property looked like a spaghetti farm. Small diameter - uber tall.

 

[rangerfredbob]

I got one of those drill from the bottom deals from Amazon, it works pretty good, there's not much of a jog in my chimney from the stove so I just take the fire bricks off the top and go through that, it gets a lot of soot out. Of course my insert uses a flexible round 6" insert tube deal...

 

[wesmann]

Thanks to all. I,ll give It a try. I live in Western MA but when I am on the roof I swear I can see the Boston harbor.

 

[rangerfredbob]

I have a 12/12 roof and just enough room between the gutter and power line to put a ladder in one spot against the brick chimney which is why I went this route... but it's better than hiring someone every couple years...

 

[RalphVa]

Thanks to all. I,ll give It a try. I live in Western MA but when I am on the roof I swear I can see the Boston harbor.

We had a house in NJ on a hill, 40 miles west of NYC. On the really rare clear day, we could see the twin towers. Course, they're all cloudy to see them now.

 

[otlski]

I switched to the rotary style about four years ago. It cleans much better and faster than the standard round brushes. I have the double/triple wall six inch round mechanical chimney so it is designed exactly for that. I do not know how it would do with a rectangular cross section chimney.

The flexible extensions are a plastic material so I do worry about durability but so far so good. Since it relies on centripetal force to make contact, if a section ever did fail I would expect the brush and remaining sections to fall back to the bottom.

I go up from the bottom about 25 feet in mostly a straight shot but with a 22 degree jog near the top.