TIL my brush was going the wrong way up the flue for almost 2 years

Was doing a job over in Canton on a 1940s brick ranch and the homeowner mentioned the last sweep always left grit on her mantel. That made me stop and think, so I checked my technique and sure enough I had been running my 8 inch poly brush down from the top instead of up from the firebox on these older flues. Turns out I was pushing soot back into the smoke shelf every single time. Any of you run into this with the odd shaped flues, and do you switch brushes or switch direction?

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spencer78213d ago

Ran into the same thing on a 52 bungalow with a crooked flue, and it took me way too long to figure out why my sweeps never looked clean. Going up from the firebox is the move because you knock the soot down into the pit where you can vacuum it, instead of shoving it onto the smoke shelf where it just sits and drops grit on everything. On the odd shaped ones I keep two brushes, a stiff poly for the straight run and a smaller round wire for the bends, since an 8 inch brush will bind up and skip spots in a flue that narrows down. Flip the brush and give the smoke shelf a good pass with a hand brush at the end, because that shelf is where all the junk hides. Check your rods too, sometimes the brush is fine and it's the angle you're holding the rods that's killing you. Once you start going bottom up on those old ranches, you'll see the difference in about one sweep.

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