Yeah, I had a really light, slow burning chimney fire quite a few years ago and it was a little scary watching smoke come from <between> the bricks above the roof line.
Old house, old chimney and no doubt the flue tiles are not sealed. So I have taken a new path and never allow the flue temp. at the thimble to hold or exceed 400 F (at the outside of the pipe, internal temps (easy boys!) are closer to 600 F) which is not enough to touch off creosote.... or so it seems.
The other really easy way to step around all of this is to burn clean in the first place; with a catalytic combustor in the stove, my flue gas is about as dirty as natural gas- perfectly clear and leaves virtually nothing anywhere in the flue or chimney. The downside is that as the combustor fails, the stove turns into one of those smoldering messes that were oh so popular in the 70's and 80's. That is what left the debris in my chimney that I recently cleaned out.
Now about the chimney cleaner: I bought this cheap but [I was hoping] adequate kit:
http://www.amazon.com/Gardus-Inc-RCH205-Chimney-Cleaning/dp/B0010H5JXA I had an older, thread type fiberglass rod set up but that was a gigantic pain in the butt and did not work well at all, at least it did not for me. But this foolish thing worked amazingly well! It is really nothing more than a weed eater (it literally uses weed eater line as the 'whip') on a stick that is spun by a drill and worked up / down the chimney. One of the really cool parts is that because of the button lock on all connected pieces, it can be rotated in either direction and what I found worked fantastically well was to make three passes over a 3' length of chimney, changing rotation each time. The second and third passes really loosened up the garbage in the flue, I I think because the whip was coming at the debris from the other side and knocking it off.
I have a little bit of hard, glazed creosote near the thimble that this thing would not entirely remove. I am thinking about replacing the weed eater plastic whip lines with steel cable and having at it again. The cable should be fairly kind to the chimney while being more aggressive than the plastic. I am just not going to use one of the chain cleaners because I think it would chip / crack the fuel tiles, especially near the joints so while a chain head cleaner might work great, I think it is too aggressive for an older chimney.
Brian
Having had to respond to chimney fires, I can certainly attest to their dangers especially when the homeowners think that they've taken care of it themselves. We had one in a home in the subdivision where the station was many years ago where the homeowner had thought that they took care of it with a garden hose. Upon arriving, no smoke coming from the chimney. Up on the roof everything looked fine. until we looked at the crack between the cricket and the chimney. It was glowing red down below. Down we go to the living room. Removed the drywall where the chimney was in the wall and ceiling and found several studs in the process of burning or were totally gone. That wall was on fire. Thank goodness for them we thoroughly checked everything out.
The moral of the story is that the chimney liner has to be in the best of shape without any cracks in order for the above process to work without danger. I definitely wouldn't recommend it.
