Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage in El Segundo, CA

Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage for El Segundo Homeowners

El Segundo is a small city with an unusually consistent housing stock: modest one and two-storey houses built largely between the 1920s and the 1940s on compact lots, with correspondingly modest chimneys. Fireboxes are small, flues are short, and the stacks are simple — which makes the work straightforward and makes access the main variable, because the lots are tight and there is frequently nowhere obvious to set a ladder. The environmental picture is distinctive. El Segundo sits directly on the coast with the refinery and the airport immediately adjacent, and the combination of salt air and industrial atmosphere is hard on exposed metalwork; caps and flashing here weather noticeably faster than a mile inland. A good proportion of the original fireplaces have been converted to gas over the years, and because the houses are small and the flues short, an incorrectly set up conversion has less margin for error than it would in a larger house — a short flue that is not drawing properly makes itself known in the room very quickly.

Consistent 1920s-40s small-lot housing with modest fireboxes and short flues, tight access for roof work, coastal plus industrial atmospheric exposure on metalwork, and gas conversions with little draft margin on short flues.

A chimney is the only part of a roof that is deliberately full of holes, and Los Angeles tests that arrangement in a punishing way. Months of dry heat open joints and shrink sealant, and then a season's rain arrives inside a few atmospheric river systems, hitting masonry that has had no chance to acclimatise. Water gets in at four places: a cracked crown, failed flashing where the stack passes through the roof, a missing or damaged cap, and brickwork that has become porous enough to drink. The difficulty is that the stain inside the house rarely appears under the actual entry point — water tracks down the outside of the flue and shows up a storey below, in a different room. Sealing where the stain is achieves nothing, which is why people end up paying for the same leak three times. Finding it properly means getting on the roof and testing, not guessing from the ceiling.