Three Towns, Three Different Chimney Problems
These are neighbours on the map and they do not present the same work, which is why we write
a separate page for each rather than one page with three town names dropped into it.
Butte is the dense one. Uptown, Walkerville and the older Flats went up
between roughly 1890 and 1920, and a masonry chimney then was how the whole building breathed -
one flue for the furnace, another for a parlour stove, sometimes a third nobody has opened
since. Those stacks were built around coal, and a good number were never lined at all. The
common findings here are abandoned flues nobody can account for and two appliances quietly
sharing one.
Anaconda is 25 miles west and was built by one company, largely at once, to
a handful of plans. That makes the chimneys unusually uniform, so problems arrive as patterns
rather than one-offs - when one stack of that generation is due, the street is due. The valley
also holds a temperature inversion for days at a time, and an inversion works directly against
draft. A marginal flue that behaves all winter can spill smoke into the room for a week
straight, and owners reasonably blame the stove.
Deer Lodge is 40 miles north and is ranch country, which changes what we are
even looking at. A fair share of the appliances out there are in shops, barns and converted
outbuildings, vented through single-wall pipe assembled from what was in the yard rather than
through masonry. That is not a lining job at all - it is a listed class-A system, and it is
usually cheaper than people expect.
Pricing is the same in all three. We run Deer Lodge on set route days rather than daily, so
there is no travel surcharge but there can be a wait - booking a
sweep and anything else on one visit is the efficient way to
handle it.
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