TESTING CHEMICAL CHIMNEY CLEANERS

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If you've been looking for a way to tame the buildup of creosote in your woodburner's chimney, you can check one possibility off your list.  

Jay W. Shelton
and Cathleen Barczys

For the last century, chemical "chimney cleaners", "soot removers", and various other stovepipe "deposit modifiers" have been available to consumers searching for an alternative to the frequent chimney inspections and the sweepings that most coal— and woodburning appliances call for. Such chemical cleaners are usually dry mixtures of various compounds and/or elements, but at least one product is liquid (an aqueous solution). Whatever form they take, the compounds are put on (or sprayed into) the fire, and their manufacturers claim that the mixtures can help keep a chimney clear of creosote, while also serving to minimize the buildup of deposits inside a stove's combustion chamber and on its heat transfer surfaces. Formulations are also available for oil burning appliances, and large quantities of them are used today in some industrial furnaces and boilers.

There has, in recent years, been a good bit of debate about just how effective the chemical chimney cleaners are in reducing creosote buildup in residential flues, but there's been little scientific evidence on which to base a decision. (To the best of our knowledge, the only previous study was conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Mines in 1929—30, and that piece of research investigated the effects of such products only on coal soot ...but not on wood-generated creosote.) Therefore, in an effort to determine the effectiveness of chemical chimney cleaners, we tested four representative name—brand products, simultaneously, in six identical "airtight" (steel) stoves. (One woodburner was used with each cleaner, and two served as untreated controls.) Creosote accumulation was measured by carefully weighing each flue before and after every test.

The chemical chimney cleaners we tested were selected (from a large group of products) on the basis of two qualifications. First, we wished to examine products that had strong national recognition and wide availability ...to make the results useful to as many consumers as possible. And second, we wanted to test compounds with widely varying compositions ... in order to analyze the effects of the several different chemical formulas employed by the various manufacturers. Consequently, some products that do have wide national recognition and availability weren't included because they were similar in composition to other cleaners that we did test.

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