How we look after your information

What we keep, and why

Your name and how to reach you

So we can confirm an appointment, tell you we are on the way, and let you know when your annual check is due. That is the whole reason.

Your address, and details of the chimney itself

A chimney has a history — when it was last swept, what the liner is, what we found last time and what we said about it. Keeping that is the difference between a sweep who knows your house and one who is guessing. It is also what lets us tell you an inspection is due before it becomes a problem rather than after.

If you own more than one property, they are kept separately, because they are separate chimneys with separate histories.

What we did on each visit

Every visit ends with a written note of what we found, whether or not anything needed doing. We keep a copy. You can ask for yours at any time, and if you have an account with us you can read them all yourself.

What we do not keep

We do not store card details — a payment processor handles those and we never see the full number. We do not track you around the internet. We do not build a profile of you for advertising, because we are a chimney company and we would not know what to do with one.

Who can see it

Our own staff, when they need it to do the job. Nobody else — with three exceptions, all of them boring:

• the companies that run our email, text messages and website hosting, who process it on our behalf and are not allowed to use it for anything of their own;
• our accountant, for the parts that are invoices;
• anyone the law obliges us to tell, which in practice means a safety authority after a chimney fire.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with other trades for their marketing. Not as a policy we might revisit — there is no mechanism in our system to do it.

Messages: what you get, and how to stop them

We separate two kinds of message, because they are different things and you should be able to have one without the other.

Service messages

Appointment confirmations, "we are on our way", and your annual reminder that an inspection is due. These are part of the job you asked us to do.

Offers

Seasonal discounts and the like. You only get these if you have said yes, and saying no to them does not stop your safety reminders. We think stopping somebody's inspection reminder because they did not want a discount would be a strange thing to do to a person with a chimney.

How to stop any of it

• Reply STOP to any text.
• Use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any email.
• Change your preferences in your account.
• Or just call us on (410) 477-9144 and say so. A phone call counts.

We act on it straight away. We are allowed up to ten working days by law; we do not use them.

Your account

There is no password to forget. You give us the email address or phone number we already have for you, we send you a six-digit code, and you are in. We do this because a password is one more thing to lose, and because the code proves you are reachable at the address we hold.

We will not tell anyone whether a phone number or an email address belongs to one of our customers, including whoever typed it in. If you enter a detail we do not recognise, you see exactly what you would see if we did. That is deliberate: knowing which houses we service is knowing which houses have chimneys worth looking at.

What you can ask us for

• A copy of what we hold about you. Ask and we will send it.
• A correction. If we have your details or your chimney wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
• Deletion. We will remove your contact details and stop contacting you.

One honest caveat on deletion: we keep the inspection records themselves, with your name removed. A chimney inspection is a safety document about a building, and the next owner of that house — or an insurer after a fire — may have a legitimate reason to know what was found. We think destroying it would be the wrong thing to do. If that matters to you, ring us and we will talk it through.

Keeping it safe

Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is limited to staff who need it. We keep a record of who looked at what, which is as much for your protection as ours.

If something is wrong

Call (410) 477-9144 and ask for whoever is dealing with data. It is a small company; you will get a person.

Last updated 18 August 2026. If we change how any of this works, we will say so here and tell anyone it affects.