Chimney Sweep St Ives

St Ives is the youngest suburb on the Upper North Shore, and that changes the job. It has no heritage conservation areas and no State Heritage Register items — not for lack of character, but because it was built later than its neighbours. Orchards ran along Cowan Creek Road until the 1930s. The suburb was only rezoned from rural to residential in 1959, and most St Ives family homes were built between 1961 and 1976. From 1980 the townhouses and retirement villages arrived.

So St Ives chimneys are a different animal. Instead of Federation masonry with terracotta pots, we mostly find 1960s and 70s project-home fireplaces, slow-combustion inserts fitted years after the house was built, and flues retrofitted into openings never designed for them. The most common fault we find in St Ives is not age. It is an insert or a liner installed badly into an older opening — wrong diameter, no proper register plate, or a gap at the throat that pushes smoke back into the room.

Bushfire matters more here than anywhere else we work. St Ives is named in Ku-ring-gai Council’s bushfire risk reporting, and the suburb borders Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to the north and Garigal National Park to the east and south-east. Council identifies ember attack as the main cause of house ignition in a bushfire, and notes embers can arrive up to 30 minutes before the fire front, from 400 to 500 metres away. A cracked flue or a missing spark arrestor on the cowl is a direct route into your roof space.

The canopy here is heavy and it is tall. 47.2 per cent tree canopy in St Ives on Council’s 2020 aerial survey, and 60.6 per cent in adjoining St Ives Chase. St Ives also holds the largest remaining stand of Blue Gum High Forest, around Dalrymple-Hay Nature Reserve and Browns Forest, a critically endangered community with less than five per cent of its original extent left. Sydney Blue Gums reach 30 metres, and what falls from that height lands in flue crowns and cowls.

Two thirds of St Ives is detached houses, and there is no station. 66.1 per cent separate houses at the 2021 Census. Because St Ives has no railway line, we route by road rather than by station: the Mona Vale Road and Shopping Village end of the suburb is usually an early slot, and we can normally cover St Ives Chase in the same run.