Before you call

How this works

This page explains exactly what happens when you call the number on this site, who you end up talking to, and how this site makes money. There is nothing clever here. It is worth reading once so there are no surprises.

What this site is

El Dorado Chimney Sweep is a referral service. It is not a chimney company. Nobody here owns a brush or a truck, and nothing on this site is going to pretend otherwise.

What it does is connect people in El Dorado County who need chimney work with licensed independent contractors who do that work. The contractors carry their own insurance, set their own prices, do their own scheduling, and stand behind their own workmanship. When you book, your agreement is with them and not with this site.

The reason a site like this exists is that good chimney contractors in this county are generally better at chimneys than they are at showing up on Google. The information here is written to be genuinely useful whether you ever call or not, and if it is useful, some people call. That is the entire model.

How we get paid

The contractors compensate us for the referral. You do not pay anything to this site, and the referral does not add anything to your bill.

The obvious question is whether that biases what you read here, so here is the honest answer. It creates a pull toward telling you that you need work. We have tried to write against that pull rather than pretend it does not exist, which is why the El Dorado Hills page says outright that most gas inserts do not need an annual sweep, and why the cost page publishes real ranges instead of asking you to call for pricing. A referral site that sends contractors on calls that waste everyone's time does not stay in business, because the contractors stop answering.

What we do not do: sell your phone number to a list, pass it to five companies who all call you, or add a fee on top of the contractor's price.

What happens when you call

The number is a tracking number. It rings through to a chimney contractor working in El Dorado County, and that tracking is how the contractor knows the call came from this site. Calls may be recorded for that purpose. California requires both parties to consent to recording, so if a call is being recorded you will hear an announcement at the start and can hang up if you would rather not be.

You are talking to a contractor, not a call center reading a script. That means they can answer an actual question about your chimney on the phone, and it also means they might be on a roof when you ring. If nobody picks up, leave a message and expect a call back the same day or the next morning.

What to have ready

None of this is required, but a call goes much faster with it:

• Your town. This is the big one. A quote in Camino and a quote in Diamond Springs are different numbers for good reasons, and those reasons are mostly your roof.
• What you are burning into. Open fireplace, wood stove, insert, or gas. Stoves and inserts take longer and cost more because of the teardown.
• Roughly when it was last done. "About three years" is a fine answer. "Never, we bought the place in 2019" is also a fine answer and a useful one.
• How much you burn. A cord a winter and a dozen fires a winter are different situations.
• Anything odd. Smoke coming into the room, a smell in summer, a stain on the ceiling, birds, or a cap you can see is missing from the driveway.
• Access notes. Steep metal roof, two-story exterior stack, long gravel driveway, locked gate, a dog with opinions.

The visit

Most single-flue sweeps take an hour to ninety minutes including setup and cleanup. A stove or insert takes longer. The contractor puts drop cloths down, seals the firebox, and runs a HEPA vacuum through the whole job, so a properly done sweep does not leave soot in your living room. If it did, something went wrong with the setup.

They brush the flue, the smoke chamber, and the firebox, and they look at the cap, the crown, and the spark arrestor while they are on the roof. In most of this county the arrestor is a State Responsibility Area requirement and it is the single most common thing found missing or rusted through.

If they find something, the normal thing is that they stop and tell you rather than fix it on the spot. Stage three creosote, a cracked crown, a chase cover that has rusted out: those are separate jobs with separate tools and separate numbers, and a contractor who quotes them properly is doing it right. You are free to say no, get another opinion, or schedule it for spring. The inspection page covers what a written report includes.

Timing, and the one piece of advice worth taking

Call in August. The first cold snap lands in mid October, every person in the county lights a fire the same weekend, and from that point until February the crews are stacked. In November you wait two to three weeks. In August you get scheduled next week, at the same price, with a contractor who is not rushing to the next call.

A sweep in late summer costs exactly what a sweep in December costs. The only thing that changes is the wait, and whether you spend part of the fall with an unusable fireplace.

What we do not do

There are no reviews on this site, no testimonials, no photos of a team, and no address. That is deliberate. Every one of those would have to be made up, because this is a referral service rather than a company with a shop and a crew, and a fake five star review is worth nothing to you anyway.

The prices on this site are typical El Dorado County ranges for planning, gathered so you can tell whether a quote is reasonable. They are not quotes and nobody can quote your chimney without knowing your roof and your flue. If a number here does not match what you are told on the phone, ask why. There is usually a real answer, and it is usually access.

More on the site itself is on the about page.