Home made chimney brush ??

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2strokenut

One nut loose
Joined
Jun 28, 2011
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Tasmania Australia
Home made chimney brush ever made one ore heard of
some funny ways people clean there flu

an old timer down the road told me that he uses a
bit of heave chain on rope lowers it down his chimney
and spins it about he swears by it.
 
19.99 for a "real" chimney brush mounted to a telescoping pool vacuum pole seems to work pretty well.
The chain thing prob works-but I figure 20 bucks is a good investment over some rigged up doohickey when it comes to not burning my house down.
 
I made an adaptor for the end of my snow rake snap together alluminum poles to the brush screws on there. fibreglass wands are fine, I just din't want to store more poles.. $5 garage sale brushes snapped up when Ii see them.
Faster, and less banging on the inside of the ss liner.
 
I use a real chimney brush but too cheap to buy 25' of fiberglass chimney brush poles. I use 10' sections of 1/2" pvc pipe. I found that attaching the pipe sections together with union type couplers holds up better than the male/female pipe thread couplers I started with. Actually, to be specific, I adapted 3/4" unions to the 1/2" pipe, figured they'd be stronger than the 1/2" unions. The problem with the m/f couplings was, when pulling the brush back out (top down cleaning) there would be 10' of pipe above you 'til you could unscrew that section, was too hard to keep it standing up, would try to lay over and then snap off the male threaded part of the coupling. :msp_sneaky:
 
I have a 2'x2' square brick chimney (ID)... the chain on a rope is about the only way to do it, and it works.


Every June I go up on the roof with a gunny sack with tire chains in it with a rope tied to the sack and go up and down each side of the chimney :D
 
The "chimney" on my wood stove is only about 10 feet total so I use a steel brush on a fiberglass pole, the whole thing was $20 at Lowes but it does the job just fine for me, I HAVE heard and seen chains spinning around when I lived in the country, but if I did that on mine it would totally destroy my setup LOL
 
I just use whatever stray cat I can find and lower him down with a rope, lol. Not really, I use a 6" polly chimney brush with three 1/2" x 5' fiberglass chimney poles. The whole shebang cost under $40.00 8 years ago.

I just want to add. That I had the steel brush first but it gets hung up and stuck in my corrugated stainless steel liner so my local stove dealer turned me onto the poly brush and it has held up well.
 
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I remember my father-in-law talking about how the old-timers did it when he was growing up. They'd put sand and some river stones in a burlap sack, tie a rope to it and lower it down the flue.
 
I remember my father-in-law talking about how the old-timers did it when he was growing up. They'd put sand and some river stones in a burlap sack, tie a rope to it and lower it down the flue.

That's about what my FIL does. He uses a section of old pant leg, tied off on the bottom and filled with about 4-5" of crushed stone. Ties a rope to the top and runs that up and down the stack a few times. Cleans it right up. I've used a chain in a burlap sack. That works too.
 
I just use whatever stray cat I can find and lower him down with a rope, lol. Not really, I use a 6" polly chimney brush with three 1/2" x 5' fiberglass chimney poles. The whole shebang cost under $40.00 8 years ago.

I just want to add. That I had the steel brush first but it gets hung up and stuck in my corrugated stainless steel liner so my local stove dealer turned me onto the poly brush and it has held up well.

I lmao when I read the cat bit :hmm3grin2orange::hmm3grin2orange:
 
I lmao when I read the cat bit :hmm3grin2orange::hmm3grin2orange:

Yep, that was funny. Wasn't it Huckleberry Finn who pulled a similar stunt? Tied a rope to a cat and lowered it down through the ceiling to snatch the wig off the schoolmaster's head. :D

I recall seeing old stone chimneys standing out in the fields and overgrown lots when I lived in VA. The houses were long gone, only the chimneys remained. They were made of smooth river rocks and mortar. No liners, just stones. The old-timers used wood burning cook stoves as well and burned anything and everything. Had to be a challenge, cleaning those chimneys in the day.
 
they would have been a pane to clean some of the old ones
like that around here you would be able to climb up the inside of them
and out on to the roof
 
I think I remember the ol' chains down the chimney done by my cool old uncle when I was kid.

Today, I would worry about damaging the mortar between the masonry joints.

I dunno. I'd always used a brush on my 8" triple wall when I was still burning wood in the house.
 
Expandable Basket

I'm a member on the local fire department. I have a 6x8 inch clay lined chimney. I borrow the basket type scraper from the fire department. It has two chains that attach to a metal wire frame basket and one chain lower's it and the other pull's on an expander plate, and holds the basket against the walls as it scrapes up and out. Its hard to describe w/o seeing a picture but works like a charm.
 

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