Paper logs vs brush and soot, my morning routine changed big time

Used to spend 40 minutes every Tuesday scraping creosote with a wire brush, then hauling bags of soot down two flights of stairs in my client's brownstone in Boston. Now I run a rotary cleaner with a HEPA vac attachment, done in 15 minutes flat, and I'm not sneezing black dust for the rest of the day. The switch happened after a job last January where the brush snagged on a cracked liner and I nearly dropped the whole setup. Rotary kits cost me about $380 upfront, but I've saved probably 6 hours a week across my regular stops. Honestly, I'm still not sure it's worth it on the really narrow flues or the ones with heavy tar buildup. Anyone else make the jump and find certain chimney types where they had to go back to hand brushing?

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iris_stone2815d ago

Hold on, you're mixing up two things there. A rotary cleaner with a HEPA vac is still brushing the flue, it's just motorized instead of by hand. You didn't switch from brushing to something else, you switched from manual labor to powered labor. That's not a small difference, but it's not the big jump you made it sound like. The real question is whether that rotary head can handle the same level of tar or creosote that a stiff wire brush can dig into. On heavy buildup, I've seen rotary heads just bounce off the gunk and leave a smooth layer that looks clean but isn't. That's when you still need to break out the hand brush, no way around it. Narrow flues are a whole other animal too, the cables can kink or the head can bind up. So your instinct on that is right, you'll probably always keep a manual brush in the truck for those jobs.