Chimney Liner

Relining begins with a failure that has already happened. A clay-tile liner that has cracked, spalled, lost mortar joints, or breached after a chimney fire is no longer a safety barrier, and a camera scan is what turns 'the brick looks fine' into a documented reline decision. Texas Chimney Experts treats relining as the diagnosed replacement of a liner that exists but has failed — not the cosmetic refresh of a sound one. How this differs from flue installation: there we fit a liner where none ever existed (new construction, an added appliance, an unlined masonry stack); here the channel is already in place and the job is to tear out or abandon the failed liner and replace it full-length.

Replacing a known-bad liner starts with grading precisely what failed, because the diagnosis drives the spec. The video scope documents the failure mode — circumferential tile cracking, spalled faces dropping into the firebox, debonded joints, heat-checking left by a past flue fire — and the measurements that follow set the replacement: actual clear inside dimension, appliance outlet, and chimney height read against the NFPA 211 venting tables and the appliance listing. Alloy is selected to the fuel, 316Ti stainless for wood, coal, oil, or high-sulfur fuels and the appropriate spec for gas, because a wrong-alloy replacement corrodes on the same timeline as the liner we just pulled. Swapping a cracked liner for an undersized or mis-specified one documents nothing and fixes nothing.

Method is the second fork in the diagnosis, and the scan decides it. A failed tile flue most often takes a drop-in rigid or flexible stainless liner. Where the surrounding masonry is itself too far gone to host a drop-in, a cast-in-place poured liner forms a seamless new flue around an inflated former and re-stiffens the stack in the same pour. A gas flue left oversized by the failed liner gets downsized so combustion gases vent without condensing, and two appliances on one stack get a common-vent liner sized to the NFPA 54 tables. This is distinct from the flexible-liner service, which covers one specific replacement material for offset flues — here the reline decision itself, graded off the scan, may land on flexible, rigid, or cast-in-place depending on what the failed flue and appliance require.

Nothing is signed off until the replacement is proof-tested. A smoke or pressure test verifies the new liner and its joints are gas-tight, a draft reading confirms the sizing measured correctly, and the UL-1777 listing plus the NFPA 211 record go into your file for the permit, the insurer, or the post-fire claim — a chimney-fire reline is routinely the insurer's documentation event. That tested-and-documented finish is what separates a liner that was merely swapped from one verified better than what failed. The identical grade-spec-test discipline governs every reline on our national map, so a replacement liner carries the same engineering and the same proof in any market.