Hit 500 sweeps on my own last Tuesday and my back finally told me why the old guys use a top brush

Wyatt Chen · 2026-09-16T17:45:05.356546+00:00

I started my own gig 3 years back and just crossed 500 jobs solo last Tuesday, which sounds small until you do the math on all that ladder time. The 500th job was a two flue ranch house in Mesa and the creosote was thick enough that my standard 8 inch poly brush kept loading up in 4 feet of flue. Switched to a 10 inch wire top brush and a weighted rope from the roof and the whole run came clean in about 20 minutes instead of the 45 I used to eat. Turns out the guys telling me to work from the top down for stage 3 buildup were not just old and set in their ways. I logged the before and after on my phone and the dust in the living room dropped a ton too because I wasn't dragging junk back down through the firebox. Any of you run a top brush as your default on dirty flues, or do you only pull it out once the poly starts choking?

🐿️Pinecone Attack

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Hit 500 sweeps on my own last Tuesday and my back finally told me why the old guys use a top brush | Chimney Sweeps - Pinecone Attack