Randolph
A room full of men all dressed in black are assembling for their daily early-morning staff meeting. More than two dozen of them, many with beards, hold cups of takeout coffee, sit in chairs around a conference table, against the wall and deep into the room.
“Hey, Matt,” Russel Cook said across the room to crew leader Matt Brown. “I met your brother last night in White River Junction.”
“Yeah?” Brown replied, suspiciously.
“Yeah. My wife told me to tell you he’s even handsomer than you are,” Cook cracked.
Hoots and snorts rip through the room.
So begins another day for the chimney sweeps crew at Chimney Savers, one of the largest chimney sweep and maintenance companies in Vermont. This is the busiest time of the year for the sweeps as many work all available daylight hours to get fire hearths and wood burning stoves ready for the coming winter.
Alan Albandia, the operations manager who chairs the meeting, knocks the table to signal it’s time to get serious.
He launches into the first item of business: reading emails from customers commenting on recent jobs done by chimney sweeps and chimney technicians crowded in the room.
“Another one, short,” Albandia said, reading the second note. “It says, ‘Good job, keep it up.’ ”
The room breaks into applause for a second raucous outburst. One or two heavy boot-clad feet stomp the floor.
For generations, chimney sweeps were solo or two-man operations, frequently done on the side by roofers and masons, a trade passed down from father to son. The image of the soot-covered chimney sweep is ingrained in people’s minds by the 1964 Disney classic Mary Poppins, in which Dick Van Dyke leads a troupe of dancing sweeps singing Step in Time on the rooftops of Edwardian London, a scene which slightly sugarcoated the image of a trade that was then infamous for exploiting children to fit in the narrow smokeshafts.
Such horrendous practices are long gone, of course, and that’s not all that’s been brought into the modern age.
Today’s chimney sweeps, while still employing much of the old-school equipment like rods and brushes to scrape off creosote, now use digital cameras to look into the flue, sending images via smartphone back to the office to be viewed on flat-screen monitors.
Chimney Savers has taken a lead in updating the business by requiring all its field sweeps and technicians to be certified by the Chimney Safety Institute of America, outfitting employees in matching uniforms and providing nearly statewide service. A three-person office staff works in front of double-screen computers estimating project costs and coordinating the fleet of trucks and supply logistics for the more than half a dozen multiple-man crews dispatched to jobs across the state.
Plan of Attack
After reading the customer reviews, Albandia leads the room through the day’s work sites by projecting photos of chimneys and flues against a screen on the wall as sweeps and technicians offer advice and opinions on the best way to tackle the job.
“Just crack this out and make the connection,” Albandia instructs with the point of his pencil circling the spot in a flue of a liner installation project in Woodstock.
“That’s going to be a mess,” groans one technician in the back of the room.
“You need a challenge,” Albandia replied evenly, in superior-officer fashion.
And so it goes for the next 40 minutes as the men preview the upcoming day’s chimney sweep and maintenance projects. At the end of the meeting, Albandia hands out metal boxes with color-coded files clipped to the covers one at a time to the assigned crews.
“Let’s get rolling,” he orders, like a roll call scene in a Hill Street Blues episode, as the men grab their black personal safety equipment bags and file out to a line of trucks in the parking lot.
High Demand
Burning wood for heat — or simply for comfort on a cold winter day — is as old as prehistoric man, but still widely used: Today in Vermont, nearly 40 percent of all homes burn wood for either their main or secondary source of heat, according to the state’s Department of Health.
And chimney fires represent an ongoing hazard: In 2017 the state’s Division of Fire Safety, based on reports from local fire departments to the National Fire Incident Reporting System, said there were 186 chimney fires in Vermont and 243 in 2016.
Importantly, those figures apply only to fires contained in the chimney and not necessarily those that spread to the structure, according to Bruce Martin, Vermont’s assistant state fire marshal. Those would be classified as structure fires. Martin further also noted that not all local fire departments report through NFIRS, meaning the numbers are “probably low.”
The three months from Labor Day to Thanksgiving are the peak of chimney sweeping season in New England as homeowners get their flues brushed of hazardous creosote, a residue left over from burning wood. The oil in creosote is often a source of chimney fires, which is why fire safety professionals recommend sweeping chimneys annually.
“Soon as Aug. 1 rolls around, that’s when we get the bulk of our calls,” said Ashley Bricker, office manager of Top Hat Chimney Sweep in West Fairlee, which has two sweeps currently doing about 45 jobs a week and plans to add a third sweep soon.
But customers still hoping to tidy up their chimney before Santa slides down it may be out of luck.
“We’re booking for January now,” Bricker said.
From September through the end of October, Chimney Savers will sweep more than 500 chimneys, according to Chimney Savers co-owner Paul Bianco (cost of a basic sweep and inspection starts at $229). Although the company urges customers to have their chimneys swept in the spring to avoid the fourth-quarter crush, most put it off until the fall.
“That’s just human nature,” Bianco explained.
Spotty Numbers
Chimney sweeps, despite the importance of the work for structural safety, nonetheless do not require a license to operate in either Vermont or New Hampshire, as is the case most everywhere else in the country.
“We’re largely an unregulated industry,” said Zach Zagar, a spokesman with the Chimney Safety Institute of America, a nonprofit that provides educational resources for chimney sweeps and offers multiple levels of certification. “There are a few municipalities that regulate — one in Rhode Island, I think.”
Because the trade is unregulated, no one keeps official figures on the number of chimney sweeps in Vermont and New Hampshire, but Steven Scally, owner of Fireside Sweeps in Fremont, N.H., and president of the trade group Northeast Association of Chimney & Hearth Professionals, estimated that there are probably around 100 sweeps in each of the Twin States.
If so, only about half of them are certified by the Chimney Safety Institute of America (CSIA) according to the organization’s data, which reports 53 certified sweeps in Vermont and 50 in New Hampshire, according to Zagar. CSIA has a total of about 1,800 members, an all-time high that has been holding steady for the past two years, he said.
“There are between 5,000 to 8,000 sweeps in the country,” Zagar said, although the majority are not certified by CSIA, which requires members to take online classes and examinations.
Beneath the Soot
Chimney Savers was founded in 1989 by New Jersey native Gene Bianco, who worked as a chimney sweep before starting his own company. For a time, Gene Bianco focused on masonry work, but after his son Paul Bianco joined the company a couple years after graduating from Randolph Union High School in 2006, they began expanding into chimney sweeping, maintenance, repair and restoration.
Paul Bianco, who attended the University of Hawaii for a year before returning home to Vermont to join the family business — “I thought I might want to own a restaurant, and then I saw it was around-the-clock, but it turns out I’m doing that anyway,” he explained — now is co-owner along with his father and oversees daily operations.
The Biancos made a good impression on Mike Bedor, of Roxbury, Vt., who’s been with the company for 18 months.
Bedor previously worked as a Harley-Davidson mechanic and subsequently for a business furniture maker in Randolph before the company closed. He responded to an ad Chimney Savers had posted for workers on Craigslist and went in to interview with the Biancos, even though he had no previous experience in the trade.
“I liked what they and the company stood for,” Bedor said.
Clean Sweep
On Thursday, Bedor was at the historic 1795 home of Meg and Paul Musselwhite on Great Brook Road in Lebanon to brush the flue of the Woodstock Soapstone wood-burning stove and investigate the source of a water drip in the chimney.
Donning booties, orange plastic gloves and a facemask to prevent the inhalation of dust, Bedor appeared more like an operating-room attendant than a chimney sweep. He spent an hour at the house, feeding a brush unfurled from a stiff wire line 25 feet up the stove’s flue liner.
After collecting the flue liner’s creosote and stove’s ashes and vacuuming away the remains, Bedor got up off his hands and knees, his forehead smudged in streaks of soot like Harry Potter’s lightning scar.
“It’s not too bad, there’s not a lot of creosote buildup in the flue,” he said to Meg Musselwhite. “At the rate you are using it, you probably only need it brushed every other year.”
Next, after coming down off the roof to inspect the source of the chimney leak, Bedor reported back to Musselwhite that he had discovered the problem: cracks in both the chimney’s slate cap and the “sand wash,” which seals the edges of the chimney top, were causing water to seep down into the chimney when it rained.
He took photographs of the chimney exterior with a digital camera to send back to the office, so Chimney Savers could work on an estimate for repairs and a follow-up visit. “Then we can come out and fix it,” he said.
Bedor said the work of a chimney sweep is physically demanding — he had to ascend the roof on a ladder while carrying a second wooden one to place as a foot brace while he inspected the chimney — but it has rewards.
The trade spans back centuries and, because the job is unlikely to be lost to the internet or outsourcing, has the added bonus of secure employment.
“You’re meeting new people, traveling around the state, problem-solving,” Bedor said of his trade. “Every day presents a new challenge, and that’s what makes it interesting.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
