North Carolina's trusted chimney team

HearthGuard Chimney was founded in Charlotte in 2014 by Marcus Reid, a master sweep who spent the previous eight years working alongside fire-restoration crews across the Piedmont. He saw the same story too often: a chimney that had never been inspected, a homeowner who assumed it was fine, and a fire that started in a flue nobody could see into. He started HearthGuard with a rule that still defines the company. Nobody recommends a repair without showing the customer the problem, and every inspection includes a camera pass through the flue.

The Charlotte region gives a chimney plenty to deal with. Piedmont humidity keeps masonry damp for months, which feeds efflorescence, mortar decay, and rust in dampers and chase covers. Older brick homes in Myers Park, Dilworth, and the mill neighborhoods of Gastonia and Concord often have unlined or clay-tile flues that were never designed for today's sealed, efficient houses. Summer thunderstorms and the occasional ice event bring down limbs and loosen caps. Our technicians are trained to read those conditions, and our repairs are specified for the climate, not copied from a generic manual.

A large part of our work today is gas-log and insert conversions. Many Charlotte homeowners want the look of a fire without hauling wood, and many older fireplaces are no longer safe to burn wood in anyway. Done wrong, a conversion is a carbon monoxide risk. Done right, it is a safer, cleaner fireplace that adds value to the house. We size the unit, verify the venting, check clearances, and test the system before we hand it over. That process is the same whether the home is a new build in Ballantyne or a 1920s bungalow in Salisbury.

HearthGuard now operates staffed locations across the Charlotte metro and the surrounding Piedmont, each open Monday through Saturday and each held to the same standard as the original shop. Every technician is CSIA-trained and carries the same camera and reporting tools Marcus used on his first jobs. Customers receive a timestamped photo report after every appointment, and we keep that history on file so the next inspection starts from a known baseline. Chimneys do not announce their problems. Our job is to find them early, explain them plainly, and fix them once.