Appreciation post: The time I tried to clean a flue with a leaf blower

Got called to a house in Albany where the owner swore his flue was just 'a little dusty'. He had already tried his own leaf blower from the bottom up, which just packed all the soot and a bird's nest tighter into the smoke shelf. Took me four hours with rods and a heavy duty brush to break through the cement-like mess he made. Has anyone else had a homeowner's 'help' turn a simple job into a full day's work?

4 comments

4 Comments

david_reed221mo ago

Wait, he used a leaf blower from the bottom? How did he not just fill his whole living room with soot? That's like the opposite of how you'd even think to do it! I can't imagine how packed that mess must have been. Turning loose soot into concrete is a special kind of talent. That poor smoke shelf.

nina_taylor1mo ago

Maybe he was trying to make a soot angel.

phoenix_singh255d ago

lol i actually saw a video on tiktok about this exact thing last week. the guy had this huge pile of soot that turned into basically mud after he hit it with the leaf blower. @nina_taylor's soot angel joke is killing me though, can you imagine him trying to make one and just getting buried in wet soot instead? what i heard is that this only works if you have a completely clean chimney to start with and the soot is dry as dust. but yeah, turning loose soot into concrete is a whole new level of oops.

the_emma1mo ago

Oh my gosh, what if he was trying to do that trick where you clean a computer keyboard with compressed air? You know, blow the dust out from the inside! He probably thought the soot would just fly up and out the chimney. But a leaf blower is way too strong, and soot is sticky. It just plastered everything to the walls instead of lifting out. That's a classic case of using the wrong tool for the job.