Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage in Atlanta, GA

Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage for Atlanta Homeowners

Atlanta inside the perimeter is a bungalow city, and that shapes every chimney we touch here. West End, Grant Park, Kirkwood and Adair Park went up largely between 1900 and 1930, when a fireplace was the heating system rather than a feature, and many of those flues were built as bare brick with no clay liner at all. A century of Georgia rain has since worked on mortar that was soft to begin with. The other half of the intown picture is the reverse problem: gut renovations that dropped a modern gas insert into an original masonry flue four times too large for it, which never draws properly and coats itself in condensate.

Pre-1930s intown bungalows, frequently unlined brick flues with soft lime mortar, plus modern inserts retrofitted into oversized original masonry.

A chimney is the only part of a roof that is deliberately full of holes, and in a climate that delivers as much rain as Atlanta does, the odds catch up with it. Water gets in at four places: a cracked crown, failed flashing where the stack passes through the roof, a missing or damaged cap, and brickwork that has become porous enough to drink. The difficulty is that the stain inside the house rarely appears under the actual entry point — water tracks down the outside of the flue and shows up a storey below. Sealing where the stain is achieves nothing, which is why people end up paying for the same leak three times.