Chimney Sweeps are Cleaning up!

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With every stroke of the brush, of course, a cascade of ashes and soot plummets into the fireplace. No problem. As fast as the black dust billows up . . . the soot sweeper sucks it away. Believe it or not, the system works so well that we couldn't even get a sequence of photographs showing how well this method of controlling an otherwise messy situation operates! There just wasn't anything to show!

Once the flue has been thoroughly cleaned, Curtis uses a smaller brush to spiff up the smoke chamber and smoke shelf. All the fine, airborne dust--as you've probably guessed--continues to disappear into the soot sweeper ... while Steve shovels everything else into paper shopping bags. ("Don't use plastic garbage bags," Curtis says. "Because of their static electricity charges, soot sticks to the outside of the plastic sacks ... and then falls off on your client's rug when you move them.")

If it sounds as if the August West System has chimney cleaning down to a science ... well, it does. Using the AW streamlined method of swabbing out a flue, Steve Curtis can set up, clean a chimney, pack up, and be on his way to another job ... all in 30 minutes or less. Which ain't a bad way to earn forty bucks.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BUSINESS

If the pay can be good, it should also be pointed out that sweeping chimneys--even with the August West System-ain't exactly a desk job. Cleaning flues--no matter how you slice it--still calls for a certain amount of physical activity ... and Steve Curtis honestly earns every nickel that he's paid.

Nor is this an occupation that you can work at carelessly. A sweep in Washington State, for instance, recently broke his shoulder when a new extension ladder malfunctioned and dumped him on the ground. Then too, slovenly flue cleaners soon learn that customers can get very irate about soot tracked across rugs ... and that the negligent breathing of the same soot can be exceedingly hazardous to the lungs.

In general, though, these risks of the trade are no risk at all to the careful and prudent chimney sweep. Just as the highly publicized "trade disease" of sweeps in the 1800's--skin cancer--presents no out-of-the-ordinary danger to anyone in the business who'll make regular use of soap and water.

(In the "old" days, sweeps used to climb right down into chimneys to clean them. Naturally, this coated them from head to toe with creosote and soot. The problem was then further compounded by the fact that most people bathed only infrequently in Europe in those days ... and chimney sweeps sometimes didn't bathe at all! End result: a high incidence of skin cancer--especially cancer of the scrotum--among chimney sweeps. Which is unfortunate, since we now know that the disease could have been prevented by higher standards of personal hygiene.)

TO SUM UP, THEN ...

Sweeping chimneys may not exactly be a "lazy man's way to riches" . . . but the pay is exceptional, the demand is steadily growing for this particular service once again, and new equipment now makes the job far easier and safer than ever before. Perhaps best of all, this most definitely is one of those "dream" businesses that so many of us are always looking for: a business with flexible hours and very low overhead that requires less initial investment (figure, at most, $2,000 to get started with August West) than you can earn back in just two full weeks of work.

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