Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage in Inglewood, CA

Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage for Inglewood Homeowners

Inglewood's housing runs from 1920s Spanish and Craftsman bungalows through a very large stock of 1940s and 1950s stucco tract housing built as the aerospace and aviation industry expanded around it. The pre-war stock has conventional masonry stacks, usually single-flue and reasonably modest. The post-war stock is where the interesting problems are: small fireboxes, shallow smoke chambers, and an extremely high rate of conversion to gas log sets carried out over the decades by a wide range of hands, some of them professional. We routinely find gas lines run into fireboxes with no proper shut-off, log sets sitting in positions the manufacturer never intended, and dampers that have been clamped part-open by a previous installer and then forgotten. None of that is exotic — it is the ordinary archaeology of a neighbourhood where houses have changed hands and been improvised on for seventy years — but it is worth someone actually looking at, because a badly converted gas fireplace is the kind of fault that only announces itself in a cold snap.

1920s bungalows alongside a large 1940s-50s aerospace-era stucco tract stock, small post-war fireboxes, and a very high rate of informal gas conversions accumulated over decades of ownership changes.

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.