Liner Installation

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You rely on your chimney being safe. Whether you have a wood burning fireplace, an oil furnace or you utilize a wood stove or gas insert, your chimney needs to be able to properly handle heat and products of combustion. Stone or brick chimneys can be made safer with a flue lining that helps to move heat and gases up and out of your home.

Chimney liners are a protective barrier usually made of metal or ceramic. Liners insulate heat moving through the chimney, protecting flammable areas of your home's structure. They also protect flue masonry from cracks or crumbling mortar due to repeated heating and cooling. The National Bureau of Standards testing of masonry chimneys has shown that unlined chimneys are far less safe than those with a proper liner installed.

Chimney liners serve three main functions:

1. Protecting the house from heat transfer to combustibles. In the NBS tests, unlined chimneys allowed heat to move through the chimney so rapidly that the adjacent woodwork caught fire in only 3 1/2 hours.
2. Protecting the masonry from the corrosive byproducts of combustion. In the tests it was determined that if the flue gases were allowed to penetrate to the brick and mortar, the result would be a reduction in the usable life of the chimney. The flue gases are acidic in nature and literally eat away at the mortar joints from inside the chimney. As the mortar joints erode, heat transfers more rapidly to the nearby combustibles and dangerous gases such as carbon monoxide can leak into the living areas of the home.
3. Providing a correctly sized flue for optimum efficiency of appliances. Modern wood stoves and gas or oil furnaces require a correctly sized flue to perform properly. The chimney is responsible for not only allowing the products of combustion a passage out of the house, but the draft generated by the chimney also supplies the combustion air to the appliance. An incorrectly sized liner can lead to excessive creosote buildup in wood-burning stoves, and the production of carbon monoxide with conventional fuels. One of the most essential functions of a chimney liner is to prevent the risk of accidental fire. While chimneys are designed with material that won’t catch on fire, they sit right against the rest of your home. Support structures or combustible framing near the chimney can ignite if the heat from the chimney transfers over to them. Chimney liners limit the heat transfer, which can prevent these fire hazards from existing.

Today, metal flue liners are the most popular option for adding or replacing a chimney liner to your home, bringing with them a host of benefits. Primarily made of stainless-steel or aluminum, metal chimney liners offer high resistance to corrosion from the byproducts of combustion, protecting your home and reducing the risk of damage and likelihood of needing your chimney repaired.

One of the biggest benefits of metal flue liners is that they can be custom made for essentially any chimney. While cast-in-place liners, for example, can’t be poured in certain chimney designs, metal flue liners can be rigid or flexible, allowing them to be installed in essentially any modern home. The installation process itself is also easier and much less costly than other modern liners.