Chimney Care & Safety Tips

Created by licensed chimney sweep Dave McKnew, Chimney Care & Safety Tips is a low-budget and uneven production that tries to teach viewers how to clean and care for their chimneys, wood stoves, and fireplace inserts before concluding that folks need to hire a professional chimney sweep anyway. After a brief and interesting opening about how the chimney sweep profession came to be, McKnew and an associate point out the tools necessary for the trade (which include specialized brushes and rods), and then demonstrate the correct way to roto-rooter a chimney, dismantle and clean a wood stove, and tackle freestanding (through the wall) stoves. They also remove an insert--which only requires two strong persons and a heavily insured groin.There's some good and useful information here, as well as a handful of general safety tips, but the combination of middlin' production values and fairly technical aspects of the cleaning process make this an optional purchase at best. (Available from: Dave's Chimney Sweep, P.O. Box 4274, So. Colby, WA 98384; (206) 895-2623.)