Paulette Lysyshyn and some of her thousands of jars of preserved product

Got a fireplace or wood burning stove in your home? There's a product on the market that says it can help protect your home from chimney fires. It's CSL, the Chimney Sweeping Log.

It says on the box that the log "helps clean your chimney while it burns."

The CSL people also say it will “reduce the weight, thickness and flammability of creosote.”

Marketplace has received dozens of calls, letters and e-mails over the past couple of years about the Chimney Sweeping Log.

Everyone wants to know one thing: does it work?

The CSL's makers say while it burns like a regular fire log, its active minerals are released and will start to dry out and reduce those dangerous deposits making your next fire safer.

In other words, it’s a log spiced with a long list of chemical ingredients designed to treat your chimney. All that for a mere $20.

We enlisted the help of four Marketplace viewers to test the log:

• Homemaker Nicole Terreberry
  
• Cab driver Calvin Ralliford
  
• Filmmaker Giselle Gordon
  
• Office manager Mary Lysaght

Two of our volunteers have woodstoves, two have fireplaces and it's been at least two years since any of them have been cleaned.

"It’s not going to put us out of business tomorrow," Byle said. "It’s well-known, actually some professional chimney sweeps use chemical chimney cleaners to aid in cleaning chimneys."

The first part of our test is a visual inspection of the chimney. We sent a special small camera up the contours of the chimney. First we looked at Nicole Terreberry’s chimney.

'It's not going to put us out of business tomorrow," says Marshall Byle, chimney sweep

"It’s good and dirty and it needs to be cleaned out," Byle said.

As for the other chimneys of our testers, Mary Lysaght’s was not that dirty; Giselle Gordon's appeared well used — but not in danger of a chimney fire; Calvin Ralliford’s was quite dirty — a potential chimney fire in the making.

Near Penticton, British Columbia, the CSL’s Canadian distributor, Mike Wigley (the man who also brought the Chia Pet to Canada) says his log will do the job — even though it may not be apparent to the naked eye.

"If you look up your chimney before you use our product, it’s going to be a black chimney and you look up at it after you’ve used our product it's going to be a black chimney."

Wigley says his company will make the CSL's test results available to anyone who wants them.

Our special camera tracks for creosote — dirty residue that clings to chimney walls. Level one creosote is the least flammable while a reading of level three can cause chimney fires. It develops, for instance, when you burn lots of small fires or use green wood.

"Whether you have a level one creosote or level three creosote, CSL will treat it and make it less flammable, reduce the risk of chimney fires. That’s what we claim to do," Wigley said.

Putting the log to the test

Before we give our testers the CSL, we bag some scooped samples of creosote from each home. But it looks like the less-flammable level one creosote, commonly known as soot.

The testers burn the log as directed. After the log burned out, the testers were forthright in stoking their fires for the next two weeks. We then made return engagements to see what the log-treated chimneys looked like, starting with Nicole Terreberry’s.

A not-very-dirty chimney

"Well, I don’t really see any difference. There could be some chemical differences, but I can’t tell just by looking," Marshall Byle said.

The story was much the same at the homes of our other three testers: the chimneys looked much the same as they did before they were treated with the log.

The CSL's Mike Wigley agreed to look at our results:

"Well it is impossible for me to look at a video and ascertain the degree of creosote that’s either on that fireplace before or after," he said. "You’re looking at a visual of a lot of dust, a lot of accumulation of particles up the chimney which has happened over a period of time. That’s not the creosote we’re dealing with."

The package, however, doesn’t mention which type of creosote the log cleans.

For the second stage of our test — checking out the flammability claims — we took more samples of creosote from each home. We took those samples to a professional lab to test the flammability before and after the log danced smoke up the chimneys.

We took samples of soot pre- and post- log treatment and applied flames of approximately 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, the same method used by the lab that did the test for the company. All this to see if the log really made the chimney samples less likely to burn.

In the tests done for the CSL manufacturer, it took less than 20 seconds for the creosote to erupt into flames. But we waited, and waited for a fire. Even after a minute and a half, our creosote never caught fire, neither from the before samples or the after.

"Very little or no effect," says chemist Abe Kelly

Chemist Abe Kelly scrutinized our flammability test.

"Based on the sample presented today, no we cannot draw any firm conclusions one way or another as to the effectiveness of the Chimney Sweeping Log… I believe the worst that can happen with it is very little or no effect."

Again, we showed these test results to Mike Wigley. All of our test homes had level one creosote or soot. Wigley says we should have tested for level three creosote, the most likely to catch fire. But we couldn’t find any. And three wood-burning specialists told us that the overwhelming majority of homes never develop level three creosote.

Specialists we’ve talked to, say that only 10 per cent or so of fireplaces actually accumulate the kind of creosote that has the flammability to really cause a chimney fire.

'Don't assume the log removes all the risks… We don't claim that,' says Mike Wigley, CSL's Canadian distributor

"Well, again, I will dispute that number as being inaccurate and too low," Wigley said — although he didn't offer a number of his own.

Wigley says using the log doesn’t nullify the need to have your chimney swept, which costs about $100. We wondered what the difference in cleaning done by the CSL was versus a traditional chimney sweep. So we brought in professional chimney sweepers to get a comparison. The results were a clean sweep for the chimney sweepers at each home.

None of our testers said they would spend money on the log.

"Do not assume that simply by throwing any log once a year or twice a year removes all the risks of chimney problems because it does not and we don’t claim it," Wigley said.

But he added that his company has lots of letters and e-mails from people satisfied with what the log did for their chimneys.

The four viewers who helped with our test were not at all impressed with the dressed up log. But it’s selling, so there are those out there who like it as it is. It’s up to you to decide on which side of the divide you reside.

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