Chimney Scopes, House Fires, Hard Truths

Fireplaces feel timeless, but the safety of that glow lives inside a dark shaft most of us never see. We pull back the curtain on chimney scopes—the video inspections that reveal cracked terracotta liners, missing mortar, offsets, and even missing tile sections that can channel heat straight into framing. Along the way, we explain pyrolysis in plain language and why wood repeatedly heated over time can ignite at surprisingly low temperatures. That one insight alone can change how you think about “just one more fire.”

We share what a Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 chimney inspection actually mean, and why a Level 2 scope is the difference between guesswork and real risk assessment. You’ll hear field stories: sixteen chimneys scoped in a historic building, a flue section gone near an attic, wildlife nests and bees blocking exhaust, and a seller who lit a “goodbye fire” after being warned—and lost the house that night. We also talk insurance: when sudden damage is covered, how long-term neglect triggers denials, and why receipts for annual cleanings can make or break a fire claim. If you’re a homeowner, buyer, agent, or short-term rental host, this is practical safety you can act on today.

Our goal is simple: keep heat where it belongs—inside a safe, intact flue—and out of the spaces that can burn. Learn how to decide when to scope, what red flags demand immediate action, and how to document maintenance so insurers, buyers, and guests have confidence. If your listing touts a cozy fireplace or you’re eyeing an older home with multiple chimneys, start here. Subscribe, share this with someone who has a hearth, and leave a quick review to help others find the show. What’s your chimney maintenance routine?

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Chimney Scopes Matter
• 0:45 What We Find Inside Flue Tiles
• 2:00 A Missing Tile and Fire Risk
• 3:25 Pyrolysis Explained Simply
• 5:00 Chimney vs Sewer: Real Stakes
• 6:40 Insurance, Negligence, And Fire Claims
• 9:20 Cleaning Records And Coverage
• 10:12 Levels 1–3: What They Mean
• 13:05 Obstructions: Nests, Bees, And Blocks
• 14:30 Legal Fallout: Hidden Defects Case
• 16:30 When To Scope And When To Seal

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hello everybody. This is Jim, and with me, of course, is Laura.

SPEAKER_02: 0:04

Hello, everyone.

SPEAKER_01: 0:06

Alright, if you are buying a house and the house has a f wood burning fireplace, or even a gas-burning fireplace, it is important that you get it um scoped. Look up inside that chimney. Because it is an area of the house that you can't see during a normal home inspection, or I mean a lot of chimney sweeps, they they don't see they can't they don't look to the inside. They don't have extra service. They don't have a s they don't have a scope, that's an extra service. But it is also well the other day I did what did you do? I did sixteen chimney scopes in one day for one building. It was a big building, it was an old building, which is probably why they had so many fireplaces, because that's the main way they heated the house way back in the day. But it had sixteen chimneys, so that was a that that's a shoulder workout to do that uh chimney scope and shove it up vertically up through the chimney.

SPEAKER_02: 1:16

So sorry I wasn't there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17

So what that does though, there's a special camera that we have that we're we're looking inside of the flue tiles, because you can have it's very common that we'll find gaps between the flue tiles because the mortar between the tile sections has have worn out, deteriorated because of water coming in there. So we we often find water intrusion, we will find missing mortar, damaged terracotta flue liners is also a very common thing we'll find because the water gets down there, it freezes, it expands, it busts, it all wears out.

SPEAKER_02: 1:52

So it's very similar to a sewer scope.

SPEAKER_01: 1:54

It is very similar to a sewer scope.

SPEAKER_02: 1:56

You look for very similar issues, you look for like offsets and pipes, and you look for cracks and gaps. And I know you've done ones where you've seen into the attic or seen the wood behind it.

SPEAKER_01: 2:07

Yes, I had one where old house, they bought the house. They did not have an inspection. This is back in the day where people were being silly and waving inspections in order to make their offer stronger, is what the Asians tell you. Which I get it does, but you uh you need to have an inspector. But anyway, we did an inspection after they owned it. Normal stuff, some gaps. It was an older house. I get up around the uh attic space, all of a sudden the flue tile is gone. A whole section of it was missing. So the ones above it must have been just barely being held in by mortar. Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 2:46

Scary.

SPEAKER_01: 2:47

Because there should be a gap between that flu tile and then the brick around it. There's supposed to be a gap.

SPEAKER_02: 2:53

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01: 2:54

So somehow there's extra mortar holding that thing up. Or it was because it was mortar to the tiles above it, it was attached then to the crown at the top, but something was going on anyway. Missing tile, and there was cracks in the brick as well, and I could see the wooden attic structure through the chimney.

SPEAKER_02: 3:16

So they needed to never use that without fixing that.

SPEAKER_01: 3:19

Oh, absolutely. Never use that because all your heat, your smoke, and everything is going up and through that attic space, or definitely can. And what happened, there's a thing called paralyzed. Piralization. Yes. I was teaching the inspector the other day when I did all those 16 scopes. Right. Tim scopes. I had another inspector with me and I was training him on how to do these things. And pyrolization, what it is, you get a piece of wood, we'll we'll say, and it repeatedly gets heated up, dried out just over time. Normally wood catches fire about 450 degrees. That's about the temperature what wood will catch fire. Well, pyrolization is basically charge it and gets it prime to catch fire. So it can be as low as 170 degrees and the wood will catch fire.

SPEAKER_02: 4:10

So think of a campfire. You use your campfire out in your backyard, it's getting late, you're tired, you pour water on it, and you go to bed. Well, that wood that's in there has already been lit once and has been charred once. So the next time you go back to light your campfire, it lights that much faster. Yep. And that's why.

SPEAKER_01: 4:31

Like charcoal for your for your grill. For your grill. Or buy lump charcoal, which is basically just chumps of wood that has been heated up without oxygen so it can uh just charge. So anyway, that house was extremely dangerous for them to ever use that fireplace. So chimney scopes, I I see these as being more important than the sewer scopes. Sewer scopes are important, definitely, because if your sewer line is blocked, collapsed, it's gonna back up into your house. Unusable unless you get that cleared out.

SPEAKER_02: 5:07

But no one's gonna die.

SPEAKER_01: 5:09

But nobody's gonna die on that one. With the chimney scope, if there's an issue like the one we just described, man, you're gonna burn your whole house. I mean, sewer scope, it's a crappy situation for down the basement or wherever you're living. It's terrible, it's nasty. Nobody, unless you get some really serious illnesses, nobody's gonna die from that because nobody's gonna hang out in that.

SPEAKER_02: 5:33

There's sterilization stuff that you can use to clean that. That's not a problem down there.

SPEAKER_01: 5:37

But if you have a chimney issue and it catches a house on fire, man, that that is so much damage. Lord, do you remember wasn't it 15,000 chimney fires a year?

SPEAKER_02: 5:48

Yeah, it was something something like that. And I can't remember how many deaths, but it was up there. I know there was a another company that was doing chimney scopes, and they basically said had a similar scenario, and the sellers didn't believe them and decided that they were gonna give one more goodbye party at their house, and they lit the fire because they didn't believe the inspector for whatever reason, and it burned the house down. And luckily everybody made it out, but you you need to listen and and check your chimneys because it is dangerous.

SPEAKER_01: 6:23

Well, it was that's the seller did not. Home inspectors have no reason to make up anything. We don't do repair work. No, there's no reason for us to make something up in the hopes of doing repair work down the road. That that is silly.

SPEAKER_02: 6:37

Well, that seller definitely paid a price because he burned his house and they could have died that he was in contract to sell it was their closing going away party, like they were going to turn the house over that next day, I think it was.

SPEAKER_01: 6:53

I'd be interested to hear about that because the seller, not only did he burn his own house and insurance has to help take care of that, he's also breaching contract. Because, dude, you were in contract to sell this, you were told this is dangerous, and you did it anyway.

SPEAKER_02: 7:10

He I do know that the contract was cancelled.

SPEAKER_01: 7:13

Now I don't know.

SPEAKER_02: 7:15

I don't know if it was if they sued him or anything. I I do know that obviously the contract did not go through. There wasn't a house to go through at that point.

SPEAKER_01: 7:23

Yeah, what if you're gonna do that?

SPEAKER_02: 7:24

And well, and here's a quick another question: the seller knew that there was a problem with the chimney and yet lit a fire in the fireplace. Would insurance actually cover that?

SPEAKER_00: 7:34

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SPEAKER_02: 7:59

And why should they?

SPEAKER_01: 8:01

Oh, they they might not have.

SPEAKER_02: 8:02

Yeah, he he knew. He knew there was a problem.

SPEAKER_01: 8:06

This is a little bit of a slightly but if you have a water leak in your house, okay, and you uh let's say a pipe breaks. Pipe break, you shut the water off, you get it dried up, insurance will typically pay for that. If you have that coverage, it will take care of that. Let's say you have a water leak and you do nothing to it, you let it go on and on and on. Insurance is not gonna take care of that. You have there's a mitigated mitigation of damages. So if somebody comes over your house, they break a water line with, for example, and you don't and you just let go and go, well, that's that's on them. They're gonna pay for all the continued damages. No, that does not, that does not happen. No, no, no. Insurance is not gonna pay for your negligence, allow that to go on, which is why a lot of insurance will not uh pay for mold issues because mold is a symptom of water, and you let that pipe continue to leak forever, you did not attach your gutters, your downspouse, that's on you. Which we know of a case where it was it was a real estate agent. Yes, I know what we're talking about. Was it her sister or sister in law?

SPEAKER_02: 9:22

We don't know for sure. We are we were based on the information we had, it was a sister or a sister-in-law.

SPEAKER_01: 9:27

Okay, but anyway, she had a relative whose house the chimney caught fire, and insurance would not pay for that because they did not have a receipt showing that it had been regularly cleaned. Right. So it is very important that you get your chimneys inspected. If you use them, you're supposed to get them cleaned every year. If you don't use them and you're going to suddenly use it, you should get it looked at before you do that. Because you don't want to turn your Thanksgiving part, you know, holiday gathering into, hey, let's all gather in the yard and watch the house burn because this is the only safe place to be on our on our property.

SPEAKER_02: 10:09

Now, I I also want to clarify something here. So I've been asked a lot because I help do the scheduling. Is this a level two inspection? So there is a company out there that has created what is called a level two inspection, which is basically what we as a home inspection company do. We just don't go through that specific company and get their certification on it. So we have another certification that we go through and that we get so that we learn how to use the equipment and learn what to spot and things like that.

SPEAKER_01: 10:43

The training I did for the doing the chimney scopes, and there's no requirement in the state you have this training.

SPEAKER_02: 10:49

But we do it anyways because you know, we care.

SPEAKER_01: 10:51

The guy took Jerry Eisenhower, yes, was an instructor. He's extremely knowledgeable, he's been doing like fire prevention, chimney for a long time decades. And I'm not positive. He had some hand in some national stuff setting up programs and things like that.

SPEAKER_02: 11:09

So he might have helped create that level two thing.

SPEAKER_01: 11:12

Maybe, maybe, but level one is basically you just looking, yep, you where you put your foot, where you put your wood at the firebox, yep, firebox looks looks okay, damper looks okay. Maybe looking at the crown.

SPEAKER_02: 11:25

So that's that's a home inspection.

SPEAKER_01: 11:27

That's basically a home inspection level. That's that's it. Level two is which we can do if you request this, is we take a camera to go up inside to look for damages in the uh the flu tiles, any gaps, blockages. Because the other day, doing those 16 squirrel nests, there's a bee's nest up there as well, which maybe why and then there's something called level three. A level three is where you are actually dismantling taking some bricks off. Because the luck because level two, there's supposed, like I said earlier, there's supposed to be a gap between the flue tiles, which go up through the center of the chimney. There's supposed to be like an inch gap between that tile and the brick that makes up the exterior, the main structure of the chimney. There's supposed to be an inch gap that way the tiles can expand and contract. It's also just a little bit of a gap. So the tile were to crack and maybe the more gives it and it leans a little bit, it's only going to barely lean. There's only an inch from the side.

SPEAKER_02: 12:35

So it's got a little more.

SPEAKER_01: 12:36

So everything's planned, it's designed. Yes, yes. But you absolutely but and I don't know if anybody does it in double three unless there are there's some serious issues going on, or or for a fire investigation. We need to figure out what was going on in this. What you can't see that home inspections are not going to destroy it. Chimney sweeps are not going to destroy your your chimney either, in order to see what's going on, unless there's a really serious issues already happen. But we we can do uh the basic function as a regular home inspection, which we we do automatically.

SPEAKER_02: 13:12

Right. We do that.

SPEAKER_01: 13:13

But if you want the chimney scope, which is really the safety thing that needs done, you need to request a chimney scope.

SPEAKER_02: 13:19

Now, do you remember a few years ago where one of our inspectors was subpoena is not the right word. He had to go in for a deposition.

SPEAKER_01: 13:28

Yeah, deposition.

SPEAKER_02: 13:29

So we got a three-ring binder, literally about like two and a half, three inches thick. We had that this was like years before we started doing the chimney scopes. This was part of the reason why we started doing them actually. So we had done the home inspection, we had looked inside the box, looked outside, and something just didn't quite seem right to our inspector. And he said that the person buying the house should get it looked at before she closed. Well, she didn't. It was, you know, it was back in the day, and and they didn't do that. So the next thing we know, year or so down the road, we're, you know, getting a request for information and and you know, the report and all of that stuff. Find out that the seller and the listing agent colluded to hide the fact that the chimney needed completely torn down and replaced and had gone through several companies before they found one willing to cover it up. So I don't know if they like tweaked their language as they went down and covered up the fact that that they were, you know, like that they were gonna sell the house or that they were gonna stay there. And it just, I just want it to look better. Don't know if they did that or if the company actually knew what was going on and covered it up, no clue. But the buyer was an agent suing the listing agent and the seller. And the last I had looked, the listing agent still had her license, and she should not have that was something that could have caused people to die.

SPEAKER_01: 14:57

Oh, yeah. So your your chimney scope is more important than the sewer scope.

SPEAKER_02: 15:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 15:02

I mean, if you if you have a fireplace but you're never going to use it, yeah, why why bother get the scope? Doesn't matter. Don't don't do the scope. There's don't don't spend your money if you're not gonna ever use it, but you should at least know what the condition is. Yeah, because well the well, the one we did the other day for that that large building, we did that just because the the city who had that done, who who hired people to do an inspection of that building, they want to know if there are any structural issues because they had grant money or they're just doing maintenance for maintenance on the on the place, which totally fine. Totally fine, but you're not gonna use it just to seal it off. But you should know there's any major structural issues going in. Because you don't want you don't want a bee's nest to suddenly fall down your chimney and fall into your living room.

SPEAKER_02: 15:47

Or we we've had um swift chimney swifts where we haven't been able to do inspections and we've had to come back. Or what about our our old house? We had to take down that one chimney because like the the way they had done it and there wasn't anything supporting it underneath anymore.

SPEAKER_01: 16:03

Yes. So like we need to know what's going on with that. We need what's going on. So we'll do another episode, Laura, right right after this. This let's go ahead and start to do another one on chimneys and their design structure and a little bit of the history of them.

SPEAKER_02: 16:16

Okay, we can do that.

SPEAKER_01: 16:17

All right, so that's it for this one. So if you are buying a house, get your chimney inspected if it has one. If you own a house, get it inspected and you have a fireplace. Yes, get that chimney inspector because you do not want to burn your house down because that would be tragic and potentially deadly for a family member or a guest at your house. Another thought though, if you have an Airbnb and you're down here say down here at Hawking Hills, and that's a selling point. People love fireplaces, but when is when was the last time you had that thing looked at? And can you be certain that the people building a firehouse actually know what they're doing? So we'll do we'll talk more about that.

SPEAKER_02: 17:01

And and are they going to listen to it so you can tell it's safe?

SPEAKER_01: 17:04

Anyway, that's it for this one, everybody. Thank you. Bye bye.