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Saw a 90 foot brick stack in Lowell last week with no cap, and half the guys on the crew said leave it
I was up in Lowell, MA last week doing a reline on an old mill building that got turned into lofts, and right next door there was this 90 foot brick stack with nothing on top. No cap, no spark screen, wide open. The building manager told me they haven't burned anything in it since the 80s, but rain and birds and squirrels have had free run of that flue for 40 years. Half the crew I was with said don't touch it, if it's not being used it's not our problem, and honestly I get that because nobody wants to eat the cost on a stack that size. The other half said a dead flue still pulls water down into the mortar and a freeze thaw cycle will crack that brick from the inside out, and by the time someone does want to use it the liner is toast. I keep going back and forth on it. One camp says a cap is cheap insurance, the other camp says you're just selling work on a chimney that never gets a fire lit. So what's the move here, do you cap dead flues or walk away and let it ride?
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bennett.mason17d ago
Cap it. Water getting in a dead flue is the whole problem, fires have nothing to do with it. Cheap fix now beats paying for a rebuild later when somebody finally wants to use that stack.
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