Allegan County
What Allegan County Chimneys Contend With
Allegan County sits between Kalamazoo and Holland in southwest Michigan, with a stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline on its western edge and the city of Allegan as the county seat. It is fruit-belt country, and the mix of working farmsteads, small-town housing and newer subdivisions means there is no single typical chimney here.
The western third of the county gets real lake-effect snow and the moisture that comes with it, while the eastern side behaves more like inland southern Michigan. A chimney in Saugatuck or Fennville is dealing with a noticeably wetter, windier exposure than one on the Wayland side of the county.
Older Farmhouse Chimneys in Allegan County
A lot of the county’s rural housing stock is old enough to have an original unlined masonry flue, sometimes serving an appliance it was never sized for. Where a farmhouse has been converted from wood or oil to gas over the decades without the flue being relined, the chimney is often oversized for the new appliance – which cools the flue gases, produces condensation inside the stack, and attacks the mortar from the inside out.
That is not something visible from the roof. It is what a camera inspection is for, and on a house of that age it is worth doing once before assuming the chimney is fine.