Chimney Sweep Service looks after the Brooklyn flues people forget they have
Vlad, the owner, took over a friend’s Brooklyn chimney company and spends much of his time on the flues that vent boilers and water heaters, where the danger is invisible.
Brooklyn, NY
A lot of Vlad’s work starts with someone else’s service call. A plumber comes out for the boiler and, before leaving, brings up the chimney. “Usually what happens is a plumber would recommend us,” Vlad says. “They come to service their boiler or something and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, you got to clean your chimney.’”
Often the homeowner has no idea. “They don’t even know about it,” he says.
Vlad runs Chimney Sweep Service, a Brooklyn company that sweeps, inspects and repairs chimneys around New York City. Plenty of those chimneys never see a fire. They vent gas boilers and water heaters, and nobody sits in front of a boiler flue, so it slips out of mind. Vlad has built the company around one plain idea: get the chimney checked every year, before something goes wrong. “I just feel like customers don’t really know too much about the chimneys until it’s too late,” he says.
His worry is carbon monoxide. “We work with a lot of chimneys that are used for gas appliances, and they leak carbon monoxide, so some people aren’t aware of that,” he says. “They could be living with carbon monoxide … and not even know that they’re getting poisoned.”
What he wants, he says, is to “basically warn them to get it annually checked out.” He adds, “Educate them.”
Vlad has worked in construction since about 2010 and has concentrated on chimneys since the mid-2010s. He chose the specialty on purpose. “I just picked that niche,” he says. “I kind of saw the need in it, didn’t see too much competition.”
The company itself came from a friend who was moving out of state. “I bought it off a buddy,” Vlad says. “He kind of gave it to me.” Chimney Sweep Service LLC was registered in Kings County in 2023. Vlad works with a crew and still goes out on jobs himself.
Most visits begin with a cleaning and an inspection. The company offers Level 1 and Level 2 inspections, and Vlad treats that first look as the way to learn what a chimney really needs. “Once we do that, then we can see what’s going on and see what they need from there,” he says.
That might mean a new cap, a damper, a resurfaced smoke chamber or a stainless steel liner fed down the flue. The crews also repair fireplaces, install venting for boilers and water heaters, and clean dryer vents, including the duct systems in laundromats. One customer wrote that the technician showed pictures of the inside of the flue so the customer could see it before and after.
Vlad likes to keep jobs short. “We’re usually quick,” he says. “We like to get things done within a day.” One customer wrote that the crew came out on a Sunday and, in a single appointment, swept the chimney, installed a new liner and fitted a new cap. Bigger work takes longer. Another homeowner wrote that the interior of a chimney more than 100 years old was replaced in three days, and the site was cleaned up and returned to its original state.
Chimney work is dirty, and customers notice how the crews handle that. One, whose chimney held more than 10 years of buildup, wrote in a Google review that Vlad and a co-worker “used drop cloths/vacuums/disposable shoe covers, and finished the job exactly when they predicted.”
The crews work out of Brooklyn and cross the city, “sometimes all the way to the Bronx,” Vlad says. Homeowners call, and so do building managers who need inspections. “A lot of managements, and they call us for that as well,” he says. A resident of one eight-unit co-op wrote that the building has hired Vlad twice and that his crew left no mess in any apartment.
He takes commercial jobs, but he prefers residential work. “I like dealing with the actual client most of the time,” he says.
The company’s customers make his case for him. Some wrote that the visit was the first time they had ever had a chimney cleaned, one of them soon after buying a house. One had a fireplace that had not been used in 10 years. Others called only after something went wrong: a new boiler that kept shutting off, a clogged flue, a missing cap that let rain into the flue.
The calendar works against the yearly habit. People tend to think about chimneys when the weather turns. “Soon as it gets cooler, it’s like everybody and their mother calls us,” Vlad says. In the busy stretch, the company handles five or six appointments a day, he says.
Some calls cannot wait for an opening. One customer whose fireplace had a backdraft problem wrote that Vlad came to look at it the same day. A homeowner whose chimney, more than 100 years old, had collapsed wrote that Vlad’s team responded right away, made sure the family was safe, rebuilt the ventilation piping and removed what was left of the chimney. When they were done, she wrote, they “left the roof immaculate.”