Arbor Heights, King County
One flat price covers a chimney inspection in Arbor Heights: $99 plus tax for each chimney on the house. A technician climbs to the crown where the roof allows it, works a camera through the flue from end to end, and checks the firebox, damper, cap and flashing. You receive the footage stills and a written list of findings, ranked by urgency. Should you hire us for the repair that list describes, the $99 is taken off that invoice; if you hire nobody, the fee stays paid.
What we charge
$99 plus tax
Book an inspection
Book your $99 inspection
$99 plus tax, deducted when you approve the repair
Not sure where to start
Pick what you're seeing at your Arbor Heights home — we'll point you to the right fix.
What we do
The same crew, the same written quote — for Arbor Heights homes.
Full-height brushing of the flue with a head sized to its shape and material
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Assessment of the stack from roofline to crown, with a photo of each defect
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Camera survey and measurement of the existing flue before anything is ordered
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Measurement of each flue tile, or of the whole crown for a multi-flue cap
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Burner, pilot assembly and firebox cleaned; logs or media put back in the layout the manual shows
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Joints cut back to firm mortar and repointed (tuckpointing) to match the existing profile
Learn moreRanges shown for orientation — the exact figure is written up on-site, after the inspection.
Arbor Heights only became part of Seattle in 1954, close to fifty years after the rest of the peninsula, according to HistoryLink. That late arrival has a side effect the Seattle Landslide Study points out: for the Arroyo Heights and Seola Beach slopes, older ground movement never made it into city files. When the paper trail is thin, the house itself becomes the record, and a chimney, rigid and tall, is one of the first places where a settling foundation shows up as a crack or a lean.
Take the Census ZIP area that contains Arbor Heights: 849 of 10,617 occupied homes heat mainly with fuel oil, or 8.0 percent. That is the highest oil share recorded among West Seattle's ZIP areas. Electricity covers 53.0 percent and utility gas 37.4 percent. Only a handful of households call wood their main heat, and the area reaches past the city limit, so these are not Arbor Heights figures alone.
An oil or gas furnace usually sends its exhaust through a chimney flue, sometimes the same masonry stack as the fireplace, sometimes its own. The Washington State Fire Marshal's Office urges an annual inspection of chimneys in its 2026 heating-safety release. We include every flue on the house in the camera pass, not only the one above the hearth, because a furnace runs every day while the fireplace may sit idle all winter.
Every chimney inspection we do in Arbor Heights includes:
Smoke coming back into the room, or a smell that won't go? Book the inspection first.
Book nowOur camera regularly finds the quiet kind of damage: a tile joint opened by decades of heating and cooling, a crown cracked across by water that froze in it. Seattle's nearest long-term weather record counts roughly 33 frosty nights annually, with January, December and February doing most of the damage. None of that is visible from the lawn, and most of it costs far less to fix early than late.
We walk the yard first to see the stack from every side, looking for lean, missing mortar and the state of the cap and flashing.
On a roof we can walk, we inspect the crown and flue mouth by hand; on a steep or slick one, the camera does that job from below.
The camera travels the flue while you watch on the screen if you like, pausing on every joint that looks wrong.
Defects are listed one by one, each beside its picture and an urgency rating, telling you what can wait and what cannot.
About half of the housing units in the ZIP code area that includes Arbor Heights went up between 1940 and 1969, and the median one dates from 1965. Many of these homes were already standing on April 29, 1965, when a magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck. HistoryLink reports that a survey of 188 West Seattle blocks afterward reached a tally of 5,005 chimneys, a third of them (1,712, or 34 percent) with damage. That tally covers the surveyed blocks, not Arbor Heights by itself.
A chimney repaired in 1965 may have been patched at the top and never examined lower down, then shaken again in 2001. A camera is the only way to see a shifted tile or an open joint halfway down a flue. That is why we film the whole length on a house of this age, even when the crown looks tidy.
What this work is quoted at for Arbor Heights homes — the exact figure comes from the $99 on-site inspection, credited toward the work.
| Service | Price in Arbor Heights | What that covers |
|---|---|---|
| Chimney Inspection | $99 plus tax | Level 1 visual; Level 2 adds a full camera scan |
| Chimney Sweep | $189–$449 | Full flue swept, Level 1 inspection included |
| Chimney Relining | From $1,900 | Full-length stainless liner, sized to the appliance |
| Chimney Repair | From $425 | Masonry repair — brick and mortar, scoped after diagnosis |
| Chimney Cap Installation | $235–$850 | Stainless cap fitted; multi-flue and custom at the top |
Ranges are what these jobs are quoted at in Arbor Heights. The exact figure is set on site after a $99 inspection (credited toward the job if you go ahead), and you approve it before any work starts.
Arbor Heights is the southernmost part of West Seattle, south of SW Roxbury Street, annexed to Seattle in 1954, with mostly detached houses, about half of those in its ZIP code area built between 1940 and 1969. We work every part of it — Arroyo Heights, Seola Beach included.
Arbor HeightsKing County, WA · 47.509, -122.378
Before and after
Illustrations of what each repair changes on a typical chimney — not photos of a specific job.
Before
After
Before
After
Before
After
Four steps, each one on paper — so you always know what happens next.
Choose a genuine opening on the crew's calendar. Confirmation is immediate.
Liner, crown, cap, flashing and masonry examined in order — each finding photographed.
One document, plain numbers, covering only the work your chimney genuinely needs.
The repair is completed, then handed over with before-and-after photos of every item.
A full visual and camera check of one chimney, plus written findings. Tax is added to the $99. Approving our repair quote afterward means that amount is subtracted from the job.
NFPA 211, which CSIA quotes, calls for one every year on chimneys, fireplaces and vents. The State Fire Marshal's Office repeated that advice in a September 2026 release on heating safety.
Yes, and it is worth doing. A flue nobody looks at because it has no fireplace attached still carries hot exhaust past the framing of the house.
A $99 on-site inspection, a written quote before any work, and photos of every item we touch.
