Fireplace Services

If you are planning a fireplace or stove for a new home or a remodeling, bring along your plans or measurements and take advantage of our free pre-construction consultation and free estimates. (Or call us to schedule a visit to your home or homesite.) You’ll be thrilled to watch our resident artist, Fran, sketching out the fireplace of your dreams. Keeping warm has never looked so good! Best of all, our professional fireplace design service is free! Most of our customers prefer to have our professional factory-trained and certified technicians do their installation. But if you are a “do-it-yourselfer”, we’ll be happy to pass along tips of the trade so you can safely complete your own installation.

Please don’t hesitate to call, email, or come by for free information or advice. And if you live outside Putnam County, please call toll-free, 800-264-8181. We want your business and we’ll work hard to please you. So come on in to Custom Fireplaces.

CHIMNEY RELINING:

A RELINED CHIMNEY IS A SAFE CHIMNEY! There are numerous reasons to reline a chimney. Obvious reasons to reline your chimney are if the clay (terra cotta) flue liner is cracked or if there is no clay liner. An unlined chimney simply does not meet any of today's safety standards. Using such a chimney would be like playing "Russian Roulette" - playing with a loaded gun! Even if your unlined chimney or cracked flue liner has been used for many years without yet burning the house down, this does not mean it is safe for the future. This situation is not much different than if you have long delayed changing the oil in your vehicle but the engine has not yet frozen up. This does not mean that you can ignore the need to change your oil indefinitely since your engine will never seize up.  Let's face it... wood heat has not had the very best reputation regarding safety! BUT, a big part of the problem has been that for many years, especially during the original "Energy crunch" during the 1970's and 80's, using, installing and maintaining wood heat had for the most part, been regarded as a do-it-yourself job, and there were no mandatory "rules and reuglations. In rural areas such as Middle TN, for many years, there were no building codes enforced. Sad to say, this is still the case in many counties nearby to our location in Putnam County.  A chimney properly relined with a stainless steel system not only brings that chimney up to meeting current safety standards, but such a relined chimney often  the codes. This is one area that is it hard to be too safe!

However, there are some other reasons to reline your chimney that are not at all obvious. For instance, say you know your chimney is recently built, hardly used, and is not cracked.  If you would like to install a fireplace insert to create a real heat source to help out or possiblily eliminate your heating bill, it may seem atotal waste of money to reline your chimney. But... your inefficient open fireplace was designed with a relatively large flue opening, to deal with high velocity, high heat exhaust. This stong flow of lots of intensely heated air is needs to " vacuum" up all the smoke so it would not ooze into your home. Now, you stuff an air-tight hi-tech insert which burns it's pwn smooke and creosote for fuel to heat your home into the fireplace and block off the fireplace opening with the insert's outer trim panels.  At times, for the longest overnight burns, you may choose to close the air-feed to the insert down to about the size of a pinhole. Now only a pinhole's worth of air can get in, so this causes almost no fire on the wood itself, but creates lots of smoke (really "wood-gas") which then burns and supplies the heat for the night, and you wake up to a warm home and good bed of coals to restart the fire.

Think about this: When only a pinhole's worth of air can get in, only a pinhole's worth of exhaust can escape up the chimney. Now most of the heat is already extracted and only a trickle of relatively lukewarm exhaust is leaviing. Well, it takes heat to rise and create the "draft" or suction that's pulls the exhaust up the chimney.  Remember, this flue was never designed with a high-efficiency insert in mind. We attempting to retrofit an insert into a chimney that was built to serve an inefficient open fireplace, with tons of heat intended to be sucked up along with the smoke. So... say it is intensely cold, maybe 9 dgrees. Well, 9 degree air is heavy and wants to come down the chimney! The trickle of lukewarm exhaust is going to have a heck of a time pushing its way up the chimney past all that frigid air! What really happens is the exhaust soon mixes with the huge volume of freezing air overhead in the chimney and it gets chilled... and the draft slows down to a crawl. Then  the hi-tech insert  begins to get "indigestion" in the form of "back-puffing."  Back-puffing, when mild, can be compared to hiccups, when moderate turns into belching, but when bad is most like puking! And when a stove or insert pukes, out comes smoke!  Not pleasant.  If only there were some way to shrink the size of chimney hole. That is exactly what relining the chimney can accomplish!  When this same insert is directly connected to a stainless steel liner of the proper size, it's performance is now comparable to one being tested in a laboratory! The insert or stove and it's chimney work together as a system.   Think of a modern, high-efficiency EPA certified clean-burning wood stove or insert as being like a thoroughbred racehorse -- it will not win the race being fed just ordinary hay.  The high-efficiency woodburners need a properly sized chimney to work with for best performance. Without a properly sized chimney, you may sorely dissapointed in the performance. Incidentally this exact same scenario can also happen when a freestanding woodstove is connected to an overly large flue or chimney.

There are a few situations involving specific inserts and certain chimneys where a person may get by without reling the chimney, as long as the homewoner accepts the fact that they will lose perhaps 10%-15% of the potential efficiency. Please call us or come by for details to find out how your chimney stacks up, and wehther the insert you have in mind will be suited to work OK without relining the chimney. We recommend trying to look up the chimney and see if you think the hole going up is square or rectangular, and whether it is more or less than about 12" across. Please call and ask for FRAN or BOB to speak with you about this.

HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT UNIT: FREE CONSULTATION!

(UNDER CONSTRUCTION - Coming Soon)