Spark Arrestor Installation

A spark arrestor does one fire-safety job: it catches the live embers a wood fire sends up the flue before they can land burning on your roof or in dry brush. Hot, lightweight embers ride the draft all the way to the top, and over a combustible roof or in a wildfire-prone area an escaping ember is a roof-fire or wildland-fire ignition source. Texas Chimney Experts installs and retrofits arrestor screens sized and built to contain those embers reliably. How this differs from our chimney-cap service: a cap is the weather-and-animal lid that keeps rain and wildlife out; a spark arrestor is the ember screen that keeps fire in. The two are often combined in one fitting, but their jobs run in opposite directions — the cap protects the flue from the outside, the arrestor protects the outside from the flue.

Mesh sizing is the core of this job, and it's a real measurement trade-off the cap never has to make. The screen openings have to be small enough to stop an ember — no larger than 1/2 inch under NFPA 211 — yet open enough not to clog with soot and choke the draft, which is why code also fixes a 3/8-inch minimum. Sooted shut, too fine a screen smokes the appliance back into the room; too coarse, and embers sail straight through. We size the mesh to the code range and to the way the appliance actually burns, and build the screen in stainless so it doesn't rust thin and fail open — a corroded arrestor is a screen full of holes that arrests nothing.

Much of this work is a retrofit rather than a new top. Plenty of chimneys already carry a sound weather cap but no ember screen, or an old arrestor that has rusted through, torn, or sooted solid — so the mesh is added or replaced on the existing fitting instead of rebuilding the whole top. Where a chimney has no top hardware at all, an arrestor integrated into a cap delivers ember containment and weather protection in one trip; but the arrestor function — the code-sized screen — is what this service is specifically about, and we'll fit one to a cap you already own. Unlike the cap service, where the question is sealing out rain and animals, here it's screening in sparks to a verified mesh size.

This service earns its keep in the wildland-urban interface and any home near trees or dry brush — the places where a single escaped ember is a genuine wildfire risk and a local burn code or insurer often makes a compliant arrestor mandatory. We confirm the local requirement, which can run stricter than the NFPA baseline, and document the installed mesh size so the screen is provably code-compliant for an inspection or insurance file. The same containment standard governs the work across our national network, with extra weight in fire-prone markets: a confirmed mesh size, a stainless screen that won't rust open, and a fitting that stays put — so the embers your fire throws stay inside the flue where they belong.