Chimney Liner

Relining starts with a failure that's already happened. A clay-tile liner that's cracked, spalled, lost its mortar joints, or breached after a chimney fire is no longer a safety barrier, and a camera scan is what turns 'the brick looks fine' into a documented reline decision. Texas Service Experts treats relining as the diagnosed replacement of a liner that exists but has failed — not the cosmetic refresh of a sound one. It's different from a flue installation, where we fit a liner where none ever existed; here the channel is already in place and the job is to tear out or abandon the failed liner and run a new one full-length. As the crew already handling the rest of your home, we also fold in the related work — a fresh cap, a crown check — so the reline isn't followed by three more service calls.

Since we're replacing a liner we already know has failed, the first job is grading precisely what went wrong and matching the replacement to it — not guessing. A video scope confirms the failure mode (circumferential tile cracks, spalled faces shedding into the firebox, debonded joints, heat-checking from a past flue fire), and from there we size the new liner to the actual clear inside dimension, the appliance outlet, and the chimney height against the NFPA 211 venting tables and the appliance listing. Alloy follows the fuel: 316Ti stainless for wood, coal, oil, or high-sulfur fuels, and the correct spec for gas — because the wrong alloy simply fails as fast as the one we just removed. Swapping a cracked liner for an undersized or wrong-alloy one solves nothing, so we get the spec right before anything goes down the flue.

The reline decision also forks on method, and we carry every option so the answer fits the chimney instead of the truck. A drop-in rigid or flexible stainless liner is the usual replacement for a failed tile flue. Where the masonry hosting the old liner is itself too far gone for a drop-in, a cast-in-place poured-masonry liner forms a new seamless flue around an inflated former and stiffens the chimney in a single pour. A flue venting a gas appliance that's now oversized after the old liner failed gets a downsized replacement so the gas vents without condensing, and two appliances sharing one stack get a common-vent liner sized to the NFPA 54 tables. Where this differs from our flexible-liner page: that page covers one material — the corrugated flexible liner for offset flues — while this is the reline decision itself, which can land on flexible, rigid, or cast-in-place depending on what the failed flue and the appliance actually demand.

When the new liner is in, we prove it: a smoke or pressure test confirms the liner and joints are gas-tight, a draft reading validates the sizing, and we document the UL-1777 listing and NFPA 211 sign-off for your permit, insurer, or post-fire claim — relines after a chimney fire are routinely the insurer's documentation event. That paper trail is the difference between a liner that was simply swapped and one provably better than what failed. And because one crew owns the whole job, the cap, crown, and any masonry around the new liner are squared away in the same project — you get back a chimney that's fully sorted, not a reline that left a to-do list.