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That 3 AM creosote fall taught me to check the cap before lighting
Pulled a full brush clean on Tuesday in a 1980s brick stack, but the downdraft still threw soot into the living room until I realized the top cap had a hairline crack letting rain in and loosening buildup, has anyone else had a cap failure after a seemingly perfect sweep?
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william_miller1mo ago
Last spring I had the exact same thing happen with a 1969 ranch house stack, cap looked fine from the ground but once I got up there the crack ran the full length of the seam. I ended up pulling the whole cap off, cleaning it with a wire brush, and putting a bead of high-temp silicone along the crack before clamping it back down. That stopped the rain from getting in and the soot came out clean on the next sweep. But honestly the real fix was replacing that old cap with a simple galvanized one, cost me about forty bucks and havent touched it since. The downdraft issue went away too because the new cap sits higher and breaks the wind better.
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