Spent 3 hours on a flue that just kept filling with debris

I had a job last week in a old house near downtown Portland where the flue liner was crumbling and every sweep just brought more chunks down. Took me three full hours to get it clean because I kept having to switch between rods and a vacuum attachment. Anyone else run into liners that seem to never stop shedding?

3 comments

3 Comments

abbyp612d ago

Question whether it's really that bad. I mean, three hours sounds like overkill to me. Sometimes you just gotta accept that not every flue needs to be spotless to function. If the liner's crumbling, that's a replacement issue, not a cleaning marathon. Seems like you could have saved yourself a lot of time by calling it clean enough after the first big pass and moving on. Right?

emma_garcia2d ago

Three hours on one flue? That's insane lol. I had a rental property last year where the liner was basically turning into dust every time I even looked at it. It would just keep raining down chunks no matter how many passes I made with the brush. Ended up having to do about four separate vacuum sessions between rodding attempts just to keep from making a mess worse.

nathankim2d ago

lol I feel your pain man, I've had the exact same thing with those old clay liners that just keep chipping. What finally worked for me was hitting it with a shop vac first to get the loose stuff, then using a stiff poly brush on the rods instead of steel. The steel bristles just make more chunks fall down. If you're still dealing with it, try running a camera up there first to see where the crumble zone actually is so you're not wasting time scrubbing sections that are fine.