DAMPERS

A damper is the part of the chimney that basically opens and closes access to your smoke chamber allowing the smoke to draft out your flue or when closed keeping your heat from escaping when the fireplace is not in use. The damper is usually located above the firebox . Sometimes the damper is broken, warped or even missing. Most of the time you can't replace the existing damper because the smoke chamber is built on top of it. In this case we can install a top sealing damper. It connects to the top flue tile and has a long cable that runs down the inside of the flue and is secured to the firebox side wall for easy access to open and shut your damper. There are two main kinds of top sealing dampers. One is the pop top damper. It is used when there is no multi flue cap and can freely pop up without interference and also acts like a single flue cap keeping the rain out. The next is the lyemance damper, or the round lyemance damper. It is installed in the same manner as the pop top but instead of it popping up it pivots  on a hinge and opens into the flue instead of out the top. This is used when there is an existing chimney cap that covers more than one flue and doesn't need its own cap. It also works great when you have a bluestone cap. Their is also a type of damper made for liners that fits inside the liner itself called a drop in damper. Some wood stoves have a damper right above the stove built in to the stove pipe.