A sweep counts flues, not chimneys, and that is the whole of it
A sweep’s office fills up in the autumn with dates. There are the annual customers to call back before the first cold weekend, the inspection reports to write up with their camera stills for a sale or a claim, caps and dampers to order for jobs already booked, a liner job waiting on a camera visit, and the van’s route to plan so that Stafford and Fredericksburg are not on the same morning. And in October the phone rings with one story over and over: the first fire, and the smoke.
One stack on the roof is not one job. It often carries two flues and sometimes three — the fireplace, the furnace, the stove somebody put in the basement — and the count is the only genuinely per-unit number on the form. Everything else is a pick-one about the visit: what burns in it, how long it has been, how you get to the top, and whether anything is going on while you are up there. None of it is hidden under a layer of something else, which is why a sweep can put an honest bracket on a website tonight.
It is also why the line between a sweep and a mason gets so much room on this page. Everything from the damper up the inside of the flue is a sweep’s: the liner, the soot, the cap, the top-sealing damper. The outside of the stack above the roofline — the brick, the mortar, the crown and the flashing it sits in — is a mason’s, a different trade and a different truck, and the masonry page says the same thing from its own side. Our demo account puts that sentence on a question and hands the stack over rather than quoting it. Plenty of the chimneys you look at need both, in that order.
On one account NapkinPrice™ splits that work three ways. The sweep asks eight questions and puts a range on the screen, the inspection for a sale or a claim prices the thing that is actually urgent about it, and a liner — along with a chimney that smokes or one that has had a fire in it — goes down a third path that never guesses a price at all.
The last question asks whether she has a photo of the firebox or of the stack from the garden. Her answer is on the lead, so the pictures are something to ask for when you call her back; a photo coming in with the lead is on the roadmap, so the list above does not claim it.
The eight things that set a sweep’s number
One count, five pick-ones, a yes/no and a ZIP. The hardest question on the form is the one nobody expects — how many flues there are — so the help text does that teaching rather than pretending it is obvious. Each rate in the set is a number you can change in the dashboard whenever you like.
How many flues
The base number and the only per-unit line on the service: her count times your per-flue rate, $135 on our own demo card. Ask for flues rather than chimneys and say why in the help text, because one stack commonly carries two — a fireplace and a furnace, or one fireplace up and one down. The answer has a floor and a ceiling you set, 1 to 4 on the demo, and a count outside them is refused rather than quietly changed; past four flues it is a commercial building rather than a house.
What burns in it
Open fire, a stove or an insert, a gas log set, an oil or wood furnace flue. A pick-one percentage rather than four rates, because the fuel changes how much comes out and how long it takes to get out, not the price of a flue. An open fire drops soft soot; a stove burns cooler, packs the flue harder and usually has to come forward; a gas appliance makes no creosote at all, so it comes off. Nothing, plus 22%, minus 20% and plus 15% on the demo — and the gas answer is the one that lands on the service minimum.
Years since the last sweep
A quarter inch of soft black soot is a year or two of normal burning; anything thicker is more passes with the brush and more time on the rods. At the rate, then +18% and +40% on the demo. Its help text does two jobs: it tells her how to look, with a torch, up past the damper — and it says that hard, shiny, tar-looking glazed creosote is not this service at all. That is the third path, and naming it on the question is how she gets to the right form the first time.
How you get to the top
Most of a sweep is ladders and roof time, so height is labour rather than material and it belongs on a percentage. One story off a ladder, two stories with a longer ladder and a rope, or three stories and the slate and standing-seam roofs where it is a harness, an anchor and two people. On the demo those are the rate, +15% and +40%. The honest note lives here too: a pooled percent lands on everything additive, so the roof band is charged on the cap as well — which is fair, because fitting one up there really is harder.
A cap, while you are already up there
A flat amount on a pick-one: nothing, $285 for a stainless single-flue cap, $720 for a multi-flue chase cover and cap on the demo. It is the line that pays for the visit, and it is worth doing on the trip she has already booked rather than on a second one. Say out loud that it is priced for ONE cap on the job and not once per flue — a flat adder is added once however many flues there are, so a second open flue on the same stack is trued up on site.
A seized or missing damper
A yes/no with your own flat amount behind it — $465 on the demo, for a top-sealing damper fitted at the crown with a cable down to the firebox. A throat damper that will not close is a hole in the roof of the house all summer and it is nearly always rusted rather than broken, so this is a real line rather than an upsell. Priced once for the job, on the flue she actually uses.
Nesting or a blockage
A yes adds no dollars at all; it lifts the job MINIMUM to $385. Removing a nest or an animal and then sweeping is a different visit from sweeping, and it has never come in under that figure — so one flue on an open fire, never swept since they moved in, one story off a ladder, no cap and no damper, and yes to this question, whose arithmetic is $322, quotes at $385 to $424 because the floor clamps the low end up rather than sitting under it. Say in the help text that swifts are protected while they are nesting; she would rather hear it from you than from a fine.
Travel zone
The demo shop charges nothing in Stafford, $25 down to Fredericksburg, $45 back up I-95 to Woodbridge, Dumfries and Quantico, and 5% plus $85 for everywhere else it travels. Keep those numbers small and honest: a sweep drives a van, not a trailer behind a dump truck. A zone is ZIPs or three-digit prefixes with a flat charge, a percentage or both, the closest match to her ZIP is the one used, and a zone set as out of area answers with a note that her ZIP is outside the area you normally cover, no price, and her details still reach you.
A real sweep, start to finish
The demo sweep service asks these eight, in this order, here for one open masonry fireplace flue in a two-story house in Stafford, three years since the last sweep, with a stainless cap fitted while the tech is already on the roof. The live engine priced the answers outside the first-fire season, and nobody typed the total at the bottom into this page.
| # | What she is asked | What she answers | What it does to the price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | How many flues are we sweeping? | 1 | 1 × the per-flue rate — $135 on the demo, and nothing else here multiplies |
| 2 | What burns in it? | An open masonry fireplace, wood | The rate itself. A stove or insert is +22%, a gas log set −20% |
| 3 | When was it last swept? | Three to five years ago | +18% on everything. Longer than that, or never, is +40% |
| 4 | How do we get to the top of it? | Two stories | +15%, pooled with the soot. Three stories or slate is +40% |
| 5 | Fit a new cap while we are up there? | A stainless single-flue cap | A flat $285 for the job, not per flue. A multi-flue chase cover is $720 |
| 6 | Is the damper seized, missing or leaking? | No | Nothing. Yes adds a flat $465 for a top-sealing damper |
| 7 | Is anything nesting in it, or is it blocked? | No | Nothing. A yes adds no dollars either; it lifts the floor to $385 |
| 8 | Got a photo of the fireplace, or of the stack? | Offered | Nothing. It is a reason to ask her for pictures |
| The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it | $95 trip + $135 flue + $285 cap = $515, then the two percentage answers pool into one and +33% applies once to all of it → $684.95 | ||
| She sees | $616 – $753 | ||
| What lands in your inbox, the second she submits | Her name, mobile and ZIP, the eight answers, and whether she has a photo | ||
Those rates are the demo shop’s, the $135, the $285, the $465 and every percentage, and Tailgate Office has no price list of its own; yours go in your dashboard. The arithmetic has three seams. The percentages pool rather than compound, so plus 18 and plus 15 make plus 33 and not the plus 35.7 you would get by multiplying them out, which here would be about $14 more. The base fee sits inside the pool, so the $95 trip is marked up 33% too — about $31, which is a bigger share on a small ticket than it looks, and the roof question’s help text says so. And the pooled figure lands on the whole additive subtotal, so the soot band is charged across the cap as well: about $51 of this midpoint for creosote that is not on the cap. The roof band reaching the cap is fair, roughly $42.75, because fitting one two stories up genuinely is harder. The total is not an illustration: the engine returns $616 to $753 for those eight answers outside the season, and the demo will show you the same.
A working example sweep’s website, kept by us but not our page, runs NapkinPrice live from the real engine. Give it the Stafford flue; between October and December the first-fire rate is on it, so expect the season’s figure rather than the table’s.
Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)The sweep quotes cleanly. A liner does not, and says so.
Where a sweep’s form draws its lines, and why.
A sweep is a known quantity before anybody arrives. You know how many flues there are, roughly how much is in them, how high the roof is and what you are fitting while you are up there, and those four answers really do carry the price. That is why this trade sits at the honest end of the estate: eight questions produce $616 – $753 for the job above, $207 – $253 for a plain annual sweep one story up with nothing fitted, and $437 – $534 for a two-flue house two storeys up with three years on both and no cap, and all three are numbers you would say on the phone.
A stainless reline is not that, and the reason is worth saying properly. A liner is priced by what is in the way — how many offsets the flue takes on the way up, whether the old clay tile has to be broken out and vacuumed before an insulated liner will pass, whether the tiles are cracked badly enough that the chimney needs work before a liner goes anywhere at all, and how far it really is from the damper to the top. That last one is the figure a homeowner is easily wrong about, because she is looking at the outside of the stack from the garden. HomeAdvisor (opens in a new tab) puts a chimney liner at $1,500 to $5,000 (June 2026), and the spread is not shyness about the number. The spread is the honest answer.
So relining routes. It is the first case on the site-visit service, the soot question’s help text names glazed creosote and says where it went, and this page never prints a per-foot or per-flue figure for a liner, because the fixture cannot compute one. That is the same discipline the masonry page keeps for natural full-bed stone: the engine has five kinds of pricing rule and none of them can carry a job whose cost lives inside a flue nobody has looked up yet.
The same service is where the boundary with the mason is drawn, and it is drawn to agree with masonry rather than to argue with it. “A stack to rebuild above the roofline — brick and mortar” is one of the seven things the first question offers, and its help text hands it straight over: the liner, the soot, the cap and the damper are ours; the brick, the mortar, the crown and the flashing are a mason’s. Neither account quotes the other’s work, and a homeowner who lands on the wrong one is told so on the question rather than after the visit.
Sweep and safety inspection — quotes instantly
The work that fills the book from October, and the one that carries the season. The trip, the drop cloths and setting a HEPA vacuum up in somebody’s living room are the base fee — $95 on the demo — so it is added once however many flues there are and cannot be answered around. On a $230 sweep that trip is 41% of the ticket, which is exactly why it belongs inside the number she is shown. A plain annual sweep — one flue, an open fire, swept a year or two ago, one story off a ladder, nothing fitted — is $207 to $253. A visit plenty of people book, the same single flue two stories up with three years of soot on it and no cap, is $275 to $336; swap the open fire for a wood stove and that same visit is $321 to $392; replace a seized damper on it and it is $832 to $1,017. The cheapest answer set possible — one gas flue, one story, swept last year, nothing fitted — floors at $185 to $204 rather than at the $184 its arithmetic works out to. And there is a ceiling: four flues, an insert, never swept, three stories, a chase cover and a damper reaches $3,676.40, so past $2,500 the widget stops pricing and hands you the lead to quote by hand.
Inspection for a sale or a claim — quotes instantly
A Level 2 to the national standard: every accessible flue scanned on camera joint by joint, and a written report with the stills in it. Its own base fee of $145 for the trip and the camera, its own $345 minimum, and a band of plus or minus 8% — TIGHTER than the sweep, on purpose, because a fixed time and a fixed report is a better-known job than a flue nobody has looked up. One flue on a two-story house for a sale, on the lender’s own form, wanted inside five business days, quotes at $515 to $605; change nothing but the date and say you are at the settlement table this week and it is $592 to $695; two flues on an insurance claim after a fire, on the insurer’s form, inside five days, is $923 to $1,083; the cheapest report possible — one flue, one story, our own form, any time in the next fortnight — floors at $345 to $373 rather than at its $320 arithmetic. Four flues post-fire on three storeys on their form reaches $1,833 and routes, because past $1,500 that is a survey and a survey gets a visit first.
Relining, smoke problems and chimney fires — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the only honest answer to a failed liner, a fireplace that smokes back into the room, glazed creosote or a chimney that has had a fire in it. It asks what it is doing, what the flue serves, roughly how far it is from the damper to the top, whether anybody has already put a camera down it and whether anybody is burning in it right now — and not one of those answers moves money. The height question says out loud that the answer is for loading the van and not for the price, which is the whole argument for this service in one sentence. In place of a number she reads that you like to see a job like this first, and you get the whole spec before you drive. This is also the only place a stack rebuild appears on the account, and it is handed to a mason on the question.
One service carries the first-fire season. Keeping it off the other was the harder call.
The event is real and it is dated. People light the first fire of the year on the first cold weekend, smell smoke, and call. From the first of October plenty of sweeps are booked weeks out. That is a capacity constraint on scheduled, deferrable work — which is the one thing a seasonal percentage can price honestly, and the same test the gutter page applied to leaf fall. So the sweep carries plus 15% from 1 October to 31 December, and the disclaimer says what it is: a scheduling signal, not a weather charge. The same flue swept in July is 15% less because in July there is a slot. The job above comes back $709 – $866 booked on 15 November, the plain annual sweep goes from $207 to $253 up to $238 – $291, and it all comes off again on 1 January.
The inspection service carries no season at all, and that is a decision rather than an empty field. An inspection before a house sale is not the same demand curve as a sweep in November: it is set by a settlement date, and a settlement date does not care what the weather is doing. Charging a seller 15% more in October because other people are lighting fires is a surcharge dressed up as a season. It prices the urgent part instead, how soon the report is needed, as a question she answers herself: any time in the next two weeks at the rate, inside five business days +20%, the settlement table this week +40%. The same sale inspection in mid-November is still $515 to $605, and its disclaimer tells her no seasonal rate applies at any time of year.
The travel zones stack on top of all of it, and they are the same engine run on the same eight answers with nothing changed but the ZIP: Stafford 22554 is $616 to $753, Fredericksburg 22401 is $639 to $781, Woodbridge 22192 back up I-95 is $657 to $803, a ZIP in the catch-all zone is $724 to $885, and a ZIP outside every zone you serve gets no price at all — a polite decline, with the lead still captured. On a small job that trip is a much bigger share and it should be: the same $207 to $253 annual sweep quotes $294 to $359 out in the catch-all ring, and the sale inspection goes from $515 to $605 up to $619 to $727. Both priced services carry a base fee and a minimum, $95 and $185 on the sweep, $145 and $345 on the inspection, and neither could have gone live without one of the two: the dashboard does not publish a priced service that could tell a homeowner $0.
In October the phone rings all day and you are on a roof
There is nowhere in this trade where answering a phone is a judgment call: you are on a ridge in a harness, or you are under a firebox with a vacuum running and a set of rods in your hands. Only 52% of callers to home-service businesses speak with a person (Invoca, 2026 (opens in a new tab)), and fewer than 3% of callers sent to voicemail leave a message (Invoca, 2024 (opens in a new tab)). If you are on the ridge when she rings, she rings somebody else. In the weeks when the sweeps in your county are booked out, the calls you miss decide how much of the autumn you actually keep.
| What a missed chimney call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| One flue swept and inspected, two stories, stainless cap fitted | $616 – $753 |
| Two flues swept on one visit, two stories, three years on, no cap | $437 – $534 |
| A Level 2 for a sale, two stories, lender’s form, inside five days | $515 – $605 |
| Two flues inspected after a fire, insurer’s form, inside five days | $923 – $1,083 |
| Callers sent to voicemail who leave a message | Under 3% (Invoca, 2024 (opens in a new tab)) |
| One recovered sweep pays for | 3 months of the bundle |
| One recovered post-fire inspection pays for | 4 months |
Once texting is switched on, CallMitt™ follows the call you missed with a text, named for your shop as every text-back must be, and when she answers it, her reply sits on the same thread as her sweep quote. The message is picked by the hour and the day, against the hours you actually keep — the demo shop runs 8 to 5, because the first appointment is inside somebody’s living room with drop cloths down and nobody wants that at seven, and by five the van is unloaded and the vacuum filters are out. A 5:20 call honestly gets the after-hours version instead of one claiming somebody is up a ladder.
The piece that catches a forwarded call waits on your own texting number. Before that number is switched on you log the call yourself, the reply is written and held, and a reply held over an hour is never sent. The rest already runs: your five messages and the 8-to-5 day, holiday, weekend and vacation handling, quiet hours, opt-outs, and the thread that puts her reply next to her quote.
How CallMitt Works Run Your Own NumbersA sweep is hired on one question, and it is about December
The man you want is on a roof edge in a harness in the last week of November, in the wind, with a set of rods over his shoulder. Plenty of people will tell you they are fine with heights in August. Finding out on day two that they are not costs you the day and the appointment behind it. The second thing a résumé never makes clear is the credential: CSIA certification is one a homeowner or an insurer can ask to see, and somebody partway to it is worth more than somebody who has never heard of it.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the side of the van. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, is he up for ladders and roofs in all weather, is he CSIA certified or working toward it, how many years has he swept, inspected or lined chimneys, how far out does he live, can he start inside two weeks, and what was the last job he worked on. Three of those are knockouts — under 18, not up for the roof work, or living further out than you will drive — and three come back as a weighted fit score, years in the trade heaviest and the start date next.
The demo job makes two choices on purpose. How far he lives is only a knockout: give miles a weight and, since a number answer scores more the higher it goes, the sweep with the longest drive would top the list. The last-job question has no weight, because a typed answer scores in full whatever it says. And every question has a Spanish translation.
Until your own number is switched on, an applicant answers on your screening page rather than by text; the questions, the knockouts and the score do not change, and he goes into the same pool. The keyword on the van starts working by text on the day your carrier registration clears.
See how CrewFunnel works
A sweep gets its review the evening of the first fire, not in January
The flue is swept, the cap is on, and the drop cloths are back in the van before dark. That evening she lights a fire for the first time since the Saturday the room filled with smoke, and this time it all goes up the chimney. If she is ever going to write you a review, it is that evening. By Christmas it is just the fireplace again, and that Saturday is a story she has stopped telling. The outfit with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, before that fire burns down.
HurraBell™ does the asking. Once review requests are switched on, you mark the job done — from the inbox, from your phone, or from your job software through Zapier — and the customer gets one request in your words, with your own Google review link, after a delay you pick: an hour, unless you change it. Three days later, one email reminder, unless the link has been opened or the customer has since texted you, messaged you from your website or had a call logged on her thread.
Review requests aren’t switched on for new accounts yet. When they are, the request goes by email once your Google review link is saved on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. A text goes as well where the customer ticked the box on your quote form or visit booking agreeing to a review-request text, and only once your carrier registration clears, the same wait as every text on this site; until then it is email only.
See how HurraBell worksOne recovered sweep covers 3 months
And a single recovered annual sweep off a ladder covers 1 of them. In a trade of small tickets booked weeks out, that is the arithmetic that matters.
The Tailgate Office Bundle
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Chimney questions we get asked
She is shown a range and never one figure, and on this trade it can be a tight one, because the four things that set the price, how many flues, what burns in them, how long it has been and how you get to the top, are all knowable before the van leaves. The disclaimer underneath says the rest in your words: a Level 1 written up before you leave, the firebox and smoke shelf vacuumed, the drop cloths in and out with you, and that if you open it up and find hard glazed creosote or a cracked liner you stop, show her, and quote that separately. She stops shopping, and the person who wanted three flues swept for eighty dollars never fills in your callback form at all.
Because nothing in the engine can carry it honestly, and a website that pretends otherwise sells a product that does not exist. A reline is priced by what is in the way: the offsets, whether the old clay tile has to come out before an insulated liner will pass, whether the chimney needs work before anything goes up it, and the real distance from the damper to the top, which nobody can see from the garden. HomeAdvisor puts a chimney liner at $1,500 to $5,000 (June 2026), and the spread is the answer. So it routes to a site visit, the help text on the soot question names glazed creosote and says where it went, and nothing on this page prints a per-foot figure for a liner. The same shape the masonry page uses for natural stone.
No, and the demo says so on the question rather than quoting it. Everything from the damper up the inside of the flue is a sweep's work: the liner, the soot, the cap, the top-sealing damper. The outside of the stack above the roofline, the brick, the mortar, the crown and the flashing it sits in, is a mason's, a different trade and a different truck. It appears on our demo account exactly once, as one of seven options on the site-visit service, and the help text hands it to a mason. The masonry page draws the same line from its own side, in its own words, and the two accounts meet at the flashing without either one crossing it. Plenty of stacks need both trades, in that order, and telling her that is worth more than a quote she has to unpick later.
Not when the season is a calendar rather than the weather. From 1 October plenty of sweeps are booked weeks out, so the plus 15% is a scheduling signal, and the disclaimer says both halves out loud, including the date it comes off. Book the same flue in July and it is 15% less, because in July there is a slot. The part worth copying is where it is NOT. The inspection service carries no season at all, because a settlement date does not care what the weather is doing and a seller is not the one lighting fires. That service prices the thing that actually is urgent, how soon the report is needed, as its own question she answers. Leaving a service without a season is a choice the dashboard lets you make.
A flat amount is added once, and the help text tells her so rather than leaving her to find out. On a dropdown or a yes/no it is added once for the job however many flues she entered, so a $285 stainless cap is one cap, priced for the flue that is open to the sky, and a second cap on a two-flue stack is trued up on site. Only the flue count multiplies. The seam worth naming is the other direction: a pooled percentage lands on the whole additive subtotal, so the roof band and the soot band are both charged across the cap. The roof band belongs there, fitting a cap two stories up really is harder, and the soot band does not, about $51 of the worked example above. If that is not how you price a cap, a per-unit rate on its own question is a field you own.
It handles it the way you would on the phone: by refusing to quote it like a sweep. Nesting is a yes/no that raises the job MINIMUM to $385 and adds no dollars at all, because removing an animal and then sweeping is a different visit and it has never come in under that. One flue on an open fire, never swept since they moved in, one story off a ladder, no cap and no damper, with yes to the nesting question, has an arithmetic of $322 and comes back at $385 to $424 — the floor clamps the low end up rather than sitting under it. The help text is also where you tell her that chimney swifts are protected while they are nesting and that you will say so if that is what she has got. She would much rather hear it from you in October than from somebody else in May.
Three flues, at $135 each on the demo, and the help text is where you teach her to count flues rather than chimneys. The fuel question is one pick for the whole job, though, so a fireplace and a furnace flue on the same quote carry one fuel percentage; say in its help text which to choose when they differ, and true it up at the visit. Three open-fire flues last swept within the last year or two, two stories up, nothing fitted, come back $518 to $633 in July and $595 to $727 in November, with the first-fire rate on.
It is a different answer to the same question. The inspection asks what the report is for, and a new stove, insert or gas conversion adds 15% on the demo, against a sale at the rate and a claim after a chimney fire at 35%. One flue, one story, on your own form and any time in the next fortnight, is $345 to $373 for a sale and $345 to $397 for a stove going in; the $345 minimum holds up the low end of both.
About fifteen minutes for your text-back messages and working hours, and about an hour for the eight sweep questions and one rate card: your per-flue rate, your fuel and soot percentages, your roof access bands, your cap amounts and your damper. Most of another hour goes on the inspection service, which has its own base fee, its own per-flue rate, its own urgency question and a tighter band. Then, once review requests are switched on for your account, paste your Google review link on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page, which takes a minute. A priced service goes live only with a real base fee or minimum behind it. No onboarding call, no setup fee, no contract, and $199 a month for all four tools.
Rebuild stacks and repoint as well? The masonry page is the one for that, the rest are among the trade pages, and for anything else, ask us.
Give her the number before the first cold weekend.
Set it up tonight. Free for 30 days, no card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.