Why Roofers Should Focus More on the Chimney

By Cass Jacoby.  

As a roofer you are uniquely primed to help homeowners maintain their chimneys and prevent leaks. Learn how to take advantage of this opportunity! 

When one thinks about roofing, they usually think about different kinds of roofs, about durability or performance in strong weather or even about solar panels or new roofing technologies. Yet, we always seem to forget about the chimneys. This isn’t because of their lack of importance, especially given how vulnerable roofs are around openings like chimneys.  

The good news is that our new RLW shines the spotlight on the importance of chimneys and the opportunities they represent for roofers. Heidi J. Ellsworth sits with Wendy Marvin, the CEO of Matrix Roof and Home, and Sashco’s Nathan Ferraro to talk all things chimneys, including how to expand your roofing offerings into chimney maintenance.  

“Chimneys are certainly a spot that you can catch more problem areas than a traditional small penetration where water's just going to shed around it and not get hung up as much,” says Nathan. As roofers, we have a unique vantage point to catch chimney leaks before they happen, just by simply inspecting them while doing a routine inspection. 

Wendy says that is how her company began to do routine chimney checks — as a way to get ahead of inevitable chimney leak calls they would get after the rain. “We started incorporating chimney inspections into our roof field inspection and just found nobody else was doing it,” says Wendy. Often forgotten about, most chimneys aren’t maintained well enough to catch leaks before they make their way into the home.  

Expanding your services into chimney maintenance doesn’t mean that you need to be a mason or a chimney sweep, it applying your roofing expertise to an area of the roof that is typically forgotten about the outside. “You have to know your limits and you have to let the customer know that we deal with the exterior of the chimney, we deal with the waterproofing,” says Wendy. “It's an opportunity for you to be able to be out there and find something that might cause an issue a year from now.” From a customer standpoint, this service means one less contractor they have to call to even identify an issue. 

Luckily, the mortar, stucco or chimney repairs that you will need to make as a roofer are easier than ever when you use Sashco’s Mor-Flexx, which eliminates the need for buckets, concrete mix and a trowel. “It's a sealant that looks like mortar, but it's actually something that's pretty flexible. So I can push on this and I can move it,” says Nathan. “The reason that you [have cracks in a chimney] is because there's some stress going on. So if you crack that or if you patch that with a mortar that's super un-flexible, guess what? It's going to crack again...So for patching, Mor-Flexx is the perfect product, right? Because you're going to have stress there. The sealant is going to absorb it, you're not going to have cracking, and you can be done with your maintenance in five minutes.” 

Read, Listen or Watch the entire webinar for more insight into how to expand your offerings to include chimney maintenance and how Sashco products can make the job go quick and easy. 

Learn more about Sashco in their RoofersCoffeeShop® Directory or visit www.sashco.com. 

About Cass  

Cass works as a reporter/writer for RoofersCoffeeShop, AskARoofer and MetalCoffeeShop. When she isn’t writing about roofs, she is putting her Master degree to work writing about movies and dancing with her plants.