Is it safe to use a wood fireplace with cracked flue tiles or a damaged chimney liner?
No — and in Arden a cracked flue usually rides along with a second problem. The 1980s–90s open masonry fireplaces in Royal Pines and Skyland already pull heat out of the room, and when the clay liner cracks too, you've got a fireplace that both wastes heat and can leak a wood fire's carbon monoxide into the house. Stop burning until it's inspected and fixed.
Two failures in one firebox
Arden's tired open fireplaces are notorious for running a net heat loss — the big open flue drafts warm room air straight up the chimney. That same aging masonry, at 2,150 feet with normal freeze-thaw and decades of use, is where clay tiles crack and mortar joints open. So the homeowner firing one of these is often losing heat and unknowingly risking the seal at the same time. Neither shows from the living room; both show on a camera run down the flue.
One fix solves both
This is the classic case for a sealed insert. Drop an insert with its own correctly-sized liner into the existing opening and the cracked-flue hazard is gone while the heat-loss problem flips — inserts commonly run 70% efficient or better where the open box was a net loss. Prefer to keep the open fireplace, and we reline it with stainless. Arden sits on the natural-gas mains, so a gas insert is a licensed tie-in permitted with Buncombe County; we're 15 minutes south. Start with a Level 2 inspection. Call (828) 545-0525.
Fireplace help in Arden
We install and service fireplaces throughout Arden and the rest of Buncombe County — just 15 minutes south from our Asheville-area showroom.
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