Environmental Chimney Service

First and foremost stay away from this company! You may get lucky and have things go ok. If things don't go ok the owner Richie Baxley will NOT work to resolve the problem. He will blame his workers, or you as the homeowner saying "I can't please you folks", to preserve his own over inflated ego. I encourage you to read this whole review. Keep in mind our chimney DOES NOT WORK after we paid for services. Richie won't give you any refund or compensation for anything even when things are NOT functional OR attractive. Keep in mind Richie Baxley WILL go to court instead of working with you as he did with us. You won't win in court (Richie knows this from experience) because according to attorney's you need someone else in the chimney sweep field to come and testify against Richie Baxley/Environmental Chimney Service. It won't matter that you have pictures, recordings, receipts, and a business owner that NEVER actually denies in court our main issue which is a non functioning (smoke pouring into our home) chimney. The chimney was also cosmetically unattractive after the workers were done. Most attorney's also won't take the case because it is a small claims matter. After a long dragged out headache of a process with this horrible company I felt it necessary to leave a review to guide other homeowners in another direction away from Environmental Chimney Services. Here is what happened. We bought an older 80's home in 2016. We used our wood burning fireplace several times. It worked well and is a masonry chimney with stucco on the outside. We suspected it needed some maintenance when we noticed mortar would come off the chimney on the outside when we would have a fire. In 2019 we hired Environmental Chimney Service to do an inspection. Richie Baxley recommended a new stainless steel liner to replace the clay tile liner. He also recommended a new damper and a new cement poured crown on top. We also asked if they could tuckpoint the mortar in the joints of the chimney. In 2020 we accepted his bid on the job and the work was started shortly thereafter. After the job was completed we noticed right away that the tuckpointing was cracking and not in all of the joints, and also didn't match the existing stucco pattern at all. Also the new crown was the texture of the plastic liner from the frame they made, it turned out looking like a wrinkled bag! We contacted Richie Baxley and he came out and told us we were "too picky". He agreed to have his workers come out and try to smooth the work. They did come out and try but the concrete was set hard and they had a difficult time with the crown. The tuckpointing they didn't fix. We called Richie and complained. HE HUNG UP ON US!! Now we started to record our conversations. We called him back to tell him how unhappy we were and he hung up on us again. Fast forward we later tried using the fireplace. The chimney would not draft! We had smoke pouring into our home!! So the chimney not only looks unattractive but it didn't work!! This was during covid when things were shut down everywhere. After our last conversation with Richie where he hung up on us, and all of the uncertainty with covid we didn't do anything immediately. Calling Richie we felt was useless as he had hung up on us twice. We later had another company come out and do an inspection. They found the liner was too small for the opening and height of the chimney. They also noticed it had the larger original liner still installed. It was never removed! They just put a smaller one inside of the old one. We also then hired a stucco guy to fix the tuckpoint job so we could paint our home. The way it was left we could not "cover" it with paint. We decided to give Richie one last chance at trying to resolve our non-working chimney issue. At first he seemed like a whole different person and like he was going to try to help square things away. He came to see if smoke came into our home during a fire. He tried to minimize how much smoke he could see and smell coming into our house! He was gaslighting us to the max. No amount of smoke is acceptable to have coming into your home. It is toxic at the least. We were trying to work with him, and thought maybe just gas logs would be ok so the liner wouldn't have to be replaced with a larger one. Richie measured and then came back with the liner as the correct size for the chimney. It doesn't work though!! As homeowners it doesn't matter to us that your chart "says" the liner is the correct size if the chimney doesn't work!! So we then looked at gas logs as Richie was going to offer us a set he had on hand. We then did some research and discovered the ones he was going to give us were known to produce a lot of soot into your home!! We contacted Richie to see if he had another option and he was going to look into it and get back to us. He didn't get back to us about other gas log options. Instead he emails us and starts making excuses in the email as to why the smoke comes into our home. He made false claims that our home has a pressure problem! Never talking about the gas log option we were looking at. He also mentioned we could just go to court over the matter. At this point we decided to take Richie Baxley/Environmental Chimney Services to small claims court because he clearly was not going to actually fix our chimney that his company messed up. We did go to court and as I mentioned you won't win unless you can get another chimney sweep company to come and testify on your behalf in court. Good luck because not too many company's want to get involved. We now are out the over 6k we paid Richie Baxley/Environmental Chimney Services plus court costs, attorney fees, and the guy we paid to fix our stucco on the chimney. We can't use our fireplace to this day because it isn't fixed! We have spent over 8,000 on this chimney between everything and it is non functional.