#TOP HAT CHIMNEY SWEEP VERMONT INSTALL#

People tend to assume that when the furnace gets serviced, the chimney is checked out, but the furnace people don’t have the equipment for that, so those systems are often much more neglected than wood-burning systems, with a lot of deteriorated masonry from sulfur and heating oil. “People tend not to think about it-every year we get emergency calls for blockages and collapsed tiles, all the way up to houses where everything has been updated, but the boiler chimney’s been run all winter long, every winter, since the 1950s. “Chimneys for central heating should be serviced annually, checked, and tuned up, or your efficiency can go down 20 percent,” says O’Connor. “We work together really well-there’s a similar vibe around hard work, customer service, and safety.”Įven if you don’t have a wood stove, you need a chimney sweep. “They got started just a couple years before my dad they were always friends, and the alliance just continued into this generation,” says O’Connor. Mad Hatter works closely with local retailers and installers like Fireside Warmth in Phoenicia. “Chimneys for central heating should be serviced annually, checked, and tuned up, or your efficiency can go down 20 percent,” says Flynn O’Connor. “But we do have a mason we can recommend.”Įven if you don’t have a wood stove, you need a chimney sweep. “We cover all fuel types, but we don’t do masonry chimneys any more-we just have too many annual cleanings to do, and those jobs are extremely labor-intensive we just don’t have the manpower,” he says.

O’Connor uses (and represents at trade shows) the SnapLok line of chimney-cleaning equipment, manufactured in Connecticut by its inventor, a longtime friend. Infrared cameras are used to check for leaks. Happily, with modern flues far too small to accommodate even a wee child, O’Connor’s state-of-the-art arsenal of inspection cameras, rotating brushes, and rods does the trick, allowing chimneys to be cleaned from below. But there are a lot that were redone around mid-century, and those IBM-era ones are past their prime now too.”

There are still some chimneys around here that are hundreds of years old, though that’s gotten rarer. “When we started, a lot of the stuff that we were working on was older.

#TOP HAT CHIMNEY SWEEP VERMONT INSTALL#

Many houses still had older stone chimneys, and the O’Connors not only cleaned chimneys, they installed the stainless steel liners that-then and now-made fireplaces much safer and simpler.' “When I was a kid, you needed two people to install the stainless liners-it involved hooking two sections together inside the chimney, and Dad couldn’t have some random person doing it-so he taught me and I’d go with him and do that on Saturdays,” says O’Connor. With the energy crisis on at that time, many homeowners were turning to wood or coal to stay warm, and a clean flue was as important to health and safety as ever. I still have his original hat, too.” – Flynn O’Connor “Dad named it that because of the traditional top-hat and Alice in Wonderland. His son Flynn, current owner of Mad Hatter, began helping out in elementary school. In 1978, Mike O’Connor founded Mad Hatter Chimney Sweeps.

There used to be ads in Mother Earth News, promoting the profession-you could send away for the tools and the training manual.” “Dad named it that because of the traditional top-hat and Alice in Wonderland,” says the younger O’Connor. In 1978, 14 years after the dizzy glee of Chim Chim Cheree, Mike O’Connor founded Mad Hatter Chimney Sweeps, inspired not by any illusions of unending bliss but by the fact that lots of people around Ulster County needed their chimneys swept. (“Though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke/In this ‘ole wide world there’s no ‘appier bloke.”) Children were apprenticed out from the workhouse or otherwise sold into the chimney life.ĭuring the 19th century, awareness grew that the inside of a fireplace flue was no place for a human of any size regulations tightened, and chimneys slimmed down it was only after 1900, when children being forced up chimneys had largely faded into memory, that chimney sweeping became somewhat romanticized, peaking in 1964 with the iconic Bert from Mary Poppins. Early on, six was considered the ideal age to enter training as an apprentice sweep-strong enough for the climb, small enough to shimmy through the tight, filthy, hot space. The first ordinance making it a requirement was passed in England in 1582, and increasing industrialization made the process all the more important. As long as there have been chimneys, they’ve needed sweeping.

Top hat chimney sweep vermont