Chimney Repair for Raritan chimneys
Most of Raritan's older houses have a single brick chimney that once served a coal or wood stove or furnace and now vents a gas furnace, a water heater or both. Mid-century capes and ranches have brick chimneys with clay tile liners, often with a fireplace flue alongside. Decades of weather and modern appliance exhaust have taken a toll on crowns, mortar and liners.
A common situation in the borough is a furnace upgraded to a high-efficiency unit that vents out the side wall, leaving the water heater alone in a large old flue that is now too big for it. Asset Roofing & Chimney inspects flues and installs properly sized stainless steel liners, rebuilds crowns, repoints and rebuilds brick, installs caps and repairs flashing.
Raritan housing
Raritan's older neighborhoods are made up largely of early-1900s two-story frame houses, gable-front homes and two-family houses on narrow lots, many with front porches and a single brick chimney. Mid-century capes and ranches fill in other streets, and newer townhouses and apartments have been added. The downtown and the highway corridors carry small commercial buildings and larger flat-roofed commercial and industrial buildings. Steep roofs are almost all asphalt shingle.
Weather & exposure
The borough sits in the Raritan River valley, where the air is humid and low ground near the river has flooded in major storms. Houses close together shade each other's roofs and limit airflow, so roofs and siding dry slowly. Winters are colder than eastern Bergen County, with ice dams on homes with little attic insulation, and summer thunderstorms bring heavy rain that tests gutters and flat-roof drainage.
Repair, repoint or rebuild in Raritan
We inspect from the roof and from inside, identify every appliance connected to the chimney and check the liner, crown, cap, masonry and flashing. A typical scope is a stainless steel liner sized for the appliances, a new crown, repointing above the roofline, a cap and new flashing.
Where the stack is loose or badly spalled, we rebuild from the roofline up. If the chimney no longer serves any appliance or fireplace, capping it and keeping the masonry sound is often enough, and in some cases removing it below the roofline is an option to discuss.
