Showerthought: The push for flexible brushes on every job is wrong

I keep seeing guys on here say you need a flexible brush for every chimney, especially old brick ones. I did a job on a 1920s house in Tacoma last week where a stiff poly brush cleared a packed creosote layer in 15 minutes that a flexible one just slid over. The owner said the last sweep spent 2 hours and left half of it. Sometimes you need the extra bite to break things up. Has anyone else found a stiff brush works better on certain builds?

3 comments

3 Comments

patricia_schmidt141mo agoMost Upvoted

Oh, the flexible brush fan club is gonna love this one. Sounds like that last sweep was basically just giving the creosote a gentle massage for two hours. Sometimes you just need the stiff plastic to actually, you know, scrape the stuff off.

willow1141mo ago

Yeah, my buddy had a similar thing happen on a really old farmhouse out in the sticks. He went in with his usual flexible set, and it was like trying to clean a cast iron pan with a feather. The creosote was baked on like ceramic. He had to drive all the way back to the shop to grab a stiff poly brush, and that thing finally cut through it. It made a horrible scraping sound, but it got the job done in one pass. Makes you wonder if the "one brush fits all" idea is just people being lazy about carrying extra gear.

adams.spencer21d ago

That's not creosote though, that's just baked on soot. Creosote is the shiny, tar-like glaze you can't scrape off with anything short of a chemical treatment or a shop vac with a wire brush attachment.