Chimney Liner

Every reline starts from a failure that's already occurred. Once a clay-tile liner has cracked, spalled, lost its mortar joints, or breached after a chimney fire, it has stopped being a safety barrier — and a camera scan is what turns 'the brick looks fine from the room' into a documented reline decision. We treat relining as the diagnosed replacement of a liner that exists but has failed, never the cosmetic refresh of a sound one. Set it against flue installation: there we fit a liner where none ever existed — new construction, an added appliance, an unlined masonry stack — while here the channel is already in place and the work is to tear out or abandon the failed liner and replace it full-length.

Since we're replacing a known-bad liner, the first job is grading exactly what failed and matching the replacement to it. A video scope confirms the failure mode — circumferential tile cracks, spalled faces shedding into the firebox, debonded joints, heat-checking left by a past flue fire — and from there the new liner is sized to the actual clear inside dimension, the appliance outlet, and the chimney height, against the NFPA 211 venting tables and the appliance listing. Alloy follows fuel: 316Ti stainless for wood, coal, oil, or high-sulfur fuels, the appropriate spec for gas, because the wrong alloy corrodes as fast as the one we're pulling out. Swap a cracked liner for an undersized or wrong-alloy one and you've solved nothing.

Method is the second fork, and we carry each path. A drop-in rigid or flexible stainless liner is the usual replacement for a failed tile flue. Where the masonry around the failed liner is itself too compromised to host one, a cast-in-place poured-masonry liner forms a new seamless flue around an inflated former and re-stiffens the whole chimney in a single pour. A flue venting a gas appliance that has gone oversized since the old liner failed gets a downsized replacement so the gas vents without condensing. Two appliances sharing one stack get a common-vent liner sized to the NFPA 54 tables. This is the broader decision behind our flexible-liner page, which covers a single replacement material — the corrugated flexible liner for offset flues — whereas relining is the decision itself, landing on flexible, rigid, or cast-in-place according to what the failed flue and the appliance demand.

Once the replacement is in, we prove it rather than assume it: a smoke or pressure test confirms the new liner and joints are gas-tight, a draft reading validates the sizing, and we document the UL-1777 listing and NFPA 211 sign-off for your permit, insurer, or post-fire claim — and after a chimney fire, that's routinely the insurer's documentation event. The paper trail is what separates a liner that was merely swapped from one that's provably better than what failed. The same scope-grade, alloy-selection, and testing discipline runs through every reline on every fireplace we touch across DFW, so the liner behind your centerpiece carries identical engineering and identical proof.