The fastest-growing town in the state, and almost none of its chimneys are masonry.
Box Elder had 11,946 people at the 2020 census and has roughly 14,857 now - the fastest growth of any South Dakota town above ten thousand. Ellsworth Air Force Base is being rebuilt around the B-21 programme with something close to two billion dollars of infrastructure work, the first aircraft are expected in 2027, and housing has followed at the pace you would expect.
That produces a housing stock unlike anywhere else on our route: overwhelmingly new, built fast, and almost entirely without masonry chimneys.
Nearly everything here vents through a factory-built system - a metal firebox connected to stainless class A pipe inside a framed chase that reads as a chimney from the street and is not one. It is a good way to build. It also means most of the vocabulary of this trade does not apply.
There is no tile to crack, so relining in the usual sense is rarely the answer - sections get replaced instead, and the constraint is that these systems are listed as complete assemblies and cannot be mixed between manufacturers.
There is often very little to sweep either, because plenty of these fireplaces have had two winters or fewer. What the first visit is genuinely for is construction debris left on the firestop, collars fitted out of sequence, and caps missing - findings that have nothing to do with soot and everything to do with how fast the house went up.
And because the envelope is tight, draft problems here are almost always the house rather than the chimney: a range hood moving more air out than the building lets in.
Houses here change hands frequently and paperwork does not always travel with them. We photograph the data plate inside the firebox on every visit, because that plate is the only record of what the system actually is - and once it is painted over or illegible, your options narrow considerably. Ask for that photograph and keep it with the house documents.
Tell us the year and whether the fireplace has been used at all.
Rather talk it through
If nothing needs doing we say so and leave. On new construction that is a common outcome.