Crown Repair
It is important that the top of your chimney is weatherproofed. If you have a traditional masonry chimney, depending on who built it, the crown may be far too thin and flat, and cracked badly. This lets water into your chimney and home, leading to mold or damage.
When we cast a new cement crown. We build them 4” tall, so that they are much more sturdy. We also build them 3” overhanging your brick chimney and sloped on all sides, that way when it rains, the water is pouring off of your crown rather than running down your brick chimney. If water continues to run down your chimney, it can lead to brick-spalling and excessive weathering.
Here are some before and after pictures to show you what we mean:
Before
After
If your chimney’s crown is damaged, cracked, or built incorrectly, water can cause many problems with both your chimney and home. Our new crowns are 4’ slabs reinforced with rebar; but almost every old crown we demo, the previous builder merely slapped it on and smoothed it, sometimes even containing wood to support the crown which we remove and replace with metal.
Once the new crown dries, we remove the forms and waterproof everything with silicone. We even silicone an airspace we leave for the flue tile to expand, so that when the flue heats up and expands, it doesn’t crack the cement crown.
