How Emberly Chimney Cleaners San Mateo Was Born in San Mateo
It was a Tuesday morning in late 2016, and we were standing in a driveway on Palm Avenue, watching a San Mateo homeowner argue with a contractor over a $4,200 liner replacement that had been sold to her the week before. She was shaking. The other company’s tech had shown her a blurry photo of “cracks” and told her the chimney was unsafe to use. She’d paid a deposit. She’d cancelled Thanksgiving at her house.
We were there because a friend of hers had suggested a second opinion. We ran a camera. The flue was sound. What the other tech had photographed was surface spalling, common in San Mateo’s older masonry after wet winters, and well within tolerance. The homeowner sat down on her front step and cried.
That afternoon, we called the regional office and asked what it would take to open a dedicated San Mateo branch. San Mateo homeowners deserved a chimney company that wouldn’t treat a Level 1 flashlight glance as a sales opportunity. They deserved the actual Level 2 inspection, camera and all, as standard practice. We opened Emberly Chimney Cleaners San Mateo three months later, operating out of a garage near El Camino Real until we earned enough trust to lease a proper shop.
Corrine Halstead’s Personal Connection to the Chimney Cleaning Trade
Corrine Halstead came to this work sideways, and that’s probably why it stuck.
Back in 2009, we were managing properties in the East Bay, mostly handling the calls when tenants complained about smoke backing up or water staining the firebox. One January, a chimney fire in a Hayward duplex emptied six units and put two people in the hospital for smoke inhalation. The sweep who’d inspected that flue six months prior had checked it from the roof with a flashlight, marked it “satisfactory,” and moved on. The creosote buildup was visible on the camera footage afterward, thick and glazed, running twelve feet up. It had been there when he looked. He just hadn’t looked properly.
Something about that failure wouldn’t let go. We started riding along with sweeps, asking questions, eventually apprenticing with a tradesman who trained us on proper Level 2 protocol: the camera, the documentation, the discipline of showing the homeowner exactly what the flue looked like from the inside. The first time we sent a camera up a flue and saw the liner joints, the mortar wash, the reality of what was actually in there, the work changed from a service into a responsibility.
There’s a smell to a chimney that’s been neglected, a particular sour ash-and-creosote note that hits when you open the damper after a season of disuse. There’s a texture to glazed creosote, glassy and black, that no brush will touch without chemical treatment first. There’s the weight of a stainless DuraFlex liner when you’re lowering it down a three-story flue in a Hillsborough colonial, hand over hand, hoping your knots hold. These sensations are how we know where we are in a job, the same way a cook knows by sound when a pan is hot enough.
If we weren’t doing this, we’d probably be restoring old motorcycles or working with wood. Something that rewards patience and punishes shortcuts. The truth is, chimney work chose us more than we chose it. Seventeen years after that Hayward fire, we still think about those tenants when a homeowner in San Mateo asks if the inspection is really necessary. It is. It always is.
Meet Corrine Halstead - The Person Behind Every Job
Corrine Halstead is the Owner and Founder of Emberly Chimney Cleaners San Mateo. She holds state licensure for chimney and fireplace work in California and has completed advanced training in NFPA 211 inspection protocols, HeatShield cerfractory flue repair, and stainless steel liner installation with both Famco and DuraFlex systems.
What separates Corrine from a corporate franchise technician is simple: she’s the one who answers when the local coordinator patches through a follow-up question. She’s the one who reviews every photo archive before it goes to the homeowner. On weekends, you’ll find her volunteering with the San Mateo County historical building preservation group, working on masonry repair techniques for pre-1950s chimneys that most modern sweeps won’t touch.
Our commitment to you is direct: every chimney we inspect in San Mateo gets the same documentation we’d want if it were our own home. No exceptions, no shortcuts.
Before
AfterOur Promise to San Mateo Homeowners
Our values aren’t posters on a wall. They’re operating instructions.
Honest pricing, in writing, before we start. Clause 1 of the Haven Standard means you get a flat price and a written scope before anyone touches your chimney. We learned this the hard way, watching that Palm Avenue homeowner discover she’d been sold fear instead of facts. We don’t do estimates that balloon. We don’t do “while we’re in here” additions.
Quality parts, documented. When we recommend a Famco termination cap or a DuraFlex liner, we show you why. The photo report includes manufacturer specs, installation photos, and the warranty registration. If we install HeatShield to resurface a damaged flue, you get the before-and-after camera footage and the material batch number.
Standing behind every job. Our warranty isn’t a piece of paper in a drawer. It’s a record in the Haven archive, searchable, transferable if you sell your home, and backed by a company that’s been documenting chimney work since 2009. If we miss something, we fix it. If we damage something, we repair it. The standard doesn’t work if it only applies when things go right.
Our Credentials
- State-licensed for chimney and fireplace work in California
- Insured & bonded for residential and commercial properties
- Years of local experience serving San Mateo, San Carlos, Redwood City, Brisbane, Atherton, Menlo Park, Hayward, San Leandro, Alameda, Palo Alto, Oakland, and Newark
- Strong local reputation built on documented inspections and transparent reporting
Every professional working under the Emberly Chimney Cleaners San Mateo name is required to hold the license and insurance their state requires, and to perform every inspection to the Haven Standard. For homeowners, this means you are not relying on a handshake or a business card. You are relying on a documented protocol, Clause 4’s camera archive, and a written record you can reference years later when you sell your home or file an insurance claim.
Rooted in San Mateo
We live here. We sweep chimneys in Baywood, in Hayward Park, in the hills above Crystal Springs Road where the fog sits heavy and masonry never fully dries out. We’ve worked on the pre-war bungalows near downtown San Mateo and the mid-century builds in San Carlos that were never lined properly for modern gas inserts. We know which neighborhoods lost chimneys in the 1989 earthquake, which flues were rebuilt with substandard materials, and which homeowners are still discovering the consequences thirty years later. This isn’t market research. It’s memory. It’s showing up to the same addresses, season after season, and remembering what we found last time.
Written by Corrine Halstead, Owner at Emberly Chimney Cleaners San Mateo, serving San Mateo and surrounding communities since 2016.