Chimney sweeps are in scorching demand as some flip to wooden stoves with an costly heating season

Sarah Wilson writes down her heating bills on colored paper taped to the inside of a bureau in her living room. She has records going back to 2017, and the price of her last shipment of oil was an all-time high at $6.99 a gallon.

Sarah Wilson keeps a record of her oil prices and sticks them on the inside of a secretary bureau, where her grandmother also kept a record of heating bills. (Mara Holpamazian/NHPR)

Wilson says her family can still afford it, but if they can heat without having to pay as much, they want to try.

Instead of using their oil tank, they use two mini-splits, small, electricity-powered devices that heat the front and back rooms of their long house. The wood stove they usually use as a fun comfort – a place to curl up with their cat on a cold night – has been burning 24 hours a day.

“I stay up late,” says Wilson. “So I’m the one who feeds it late into the night to get it into the morning.”

Many Granite Staters are struggling with high heating bills this winter. Two in five New Hampshire residents use heating oil, which has hit a three-decade high. Natural gas, propane, and electricity are also exceptionally expensive. New England relies on fossil fuels for power and heat, and those fossil fuel markets have been extremely volatile in recent months.

To deal with this, some reach for wood. Lumber banks across the country, where you can pick up lumber for free, have braced themselves for increased interest this winter.

The price of wood is also high right now – but it can be a relatively cheaper option, especially for those who have wood in stock. For the Wilsons, that means using a cable they bought a few summers ago and an old maple tree they had to cut down in the backyard.

But in the six years the Wilsons had their wood stove, they had never cleaned it. Now that they use it every day, they wanted to make sure it was ready for that much wood burning.

Enter: Christopher Britt, a chimney sweep with Black Moose Chimney and Stove. Britt’s job is to make sure stoves and chimneys are clean and safe. And he’s on the road a lot more these days – with energy costs soaring, he says, more people want to burn wood and make sure their stove is in working order.

“There were a lot more estimates and you had to write quotes for people,” he said. “I’m fully booked until mid-February, which is pretty far for this time of year.”

Christopher Britt cleans the Wilsons’ chimney. (Mara Holpamazian/NHPR)

A chimney like the Wilsons’ that isn’t maintained regularly can throw up some surprises, says Britt.

“As soon as I read that note, I was like, ‘So it might be a dork. We can find all sorts of things,’” he says.

Britt spent about two hours cleaning the Wilsons stove and chimney. He’s not exactly the picture of an old-school sweeper – no top hat, no oversized pipe cleaner – but he leans in the teeth. He tells homeowners that shaking a sweeper’s dirty hand brings good luck.

“Which is funny because not many people want to shake my hand when it’s dirty,” he says.

But modern sweepers, like Britt, have a new set of tools that allow them to check a chimney more efficiently. The first thing Britt does at the Wilsons’ is set up a large cloth and a double-filter vacuum in the living room by the stove. This job consists of three parts: a cleaning, an inspection with a camera and a check-up on the roof.

For cleaning, he breaks out the rotation system. Looks like a weed killer. He uses it to knock down the dirt that has accumulated over the years.

That dirt is called creosote, and that’s why you need a chimney sweep. It’s there in the Wilsons’ chimney, but mostly harmless—fine, powdery, and a few bits of hard, flaky soot. But if you burn wood with more moisture in it, don’t burn it hot enough, or don’t have your chimney cleaned, creosote can build up and become sticky.

“This is the stuff you really want to be wary of because it can ignite, burn and cause a chimney fire,” says Britt.

Heating is a leading cause of fires in New Hampshire, and December, January, and February are peak times for heating-related fires, according to the state Fire Marshal. Chimney fires are one of the biggest threats.

So after removing the creosote, Britt does a few more inspections to make sure everything else on the chimney is safe.

Christopher Britt is cleaning a chimney inside the house, but goes up to the roof to inspect it after he’s done. (Mara Holpamazian/NHPR)

He takes out a small screen and a cylindrical device called a “Chim Scan” — a rotating camera that resembles a jellyfish, which he sticks up the chimney to make sure nothing’s broken.

Once the Wilsons pass the camera test, it’s time for the roof. Britt leans a ladder against the house and climbs up. He is careful but not shaky.

“I’m not afraid of heights. i respect her That’s how I put it,” he says, crouching on the shingles.

Britt checks the masonry, looking for cracks or damage in the mortar or brick. He also checks the inner lining, which contains all the soot and creosote.

“He’s in good health,” he says, carefully walking in a circle around the chimney.

Once off the roof, Britt gathers his tools, packs up the van, and gets ready to head to the nearest chimney. He has four more jobs scheduled for the day. He’s still relatively clean – just a few stains on his hands – but as a sweeper you have to be okay with going home dirty every day.

“Sometimes I’m completely covered in soot from head to toe,” he says.

Now that her chimney is clean and safe, Sarah Wilson plans to load up the wood stove. She agrees to have her chimney checked regularly. And before Britt leaves, she makes sure to shake his hand.

This story is a production of the New England News Collaborative. It was originally released by New Hampshire Public Radio.