Olympia Chimney Chimney Cap Installation Nationwide

Olympia Chimney Chimney Cap Installation: The Flushing Owner’s Guide

We install Olympia Chimney-compatible chimney caps throughout Flushing, with most installations running $340-$680 including the cap, mounting hardware, and labor. We carry Olympia Chimney caps on the truck in common sizes, so most Flushing homeowners get the job done in one visit. You usually find out the cap failed when you spot rust flakes on the roof after a storm, hear rain dripping down the flue, or a squirrel sets up residence in your chimney at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Call (516) 240-9191

The cap is the chimney’s roof. When it fails, water gets into the flue and starts doing quiet, expensive damage to the liner and masonry. In Flushing, where winter freeze-thaw cycles and salt air off the Long Island Sound both work on exposed metal, a cheap cap can look rough in three years and be functionally dead in five.

Which Olympia Chimney Models This Applies To

Olympia Chimney makes caps across three main lines: the Sure-Seal series (bolt-on, fits most standard clay flue tiles), the RainRunner series (slip-in for round liners), and the Sentinel multi-flue caps (for homes with two or three flues sharing one crown). The critical thing to get right is the flue measurement, not the brand label. We measure both the inner and outer flue dimensions before quoting anything, because a cap that’s off by half an inch either won’t seat or will rattle in the wind.

Here’s the compatibility gotcha most owners miss: Flushing homes built before 1980 often have non-standard clay flue dimensions. A 13×13 cap won’t seat on a 12¾×12¾ tile without a custom adapter plate. If you already own an Olympia cap and you’re not sure it matches, bring us the measurements and we’ll tell you plainly whether it’ll work before you pay for anything.

As for OEM versus aftermarket: Olympia’s own caps are solid, and we stock them. But for some older flues, a quality equivalent from Gelco or Famco actually fits better because those brands offer more odd-size options. We’ll show you the options and the price difference, then you choose. Level Two Chimney Flushing is an independent service provider; we’re not affiliated with Olympia Chimney, but we stock, install, and warrant their products every week.

Signs Your Olympia Chimney Chimney Cap Installation Is Failing

• Rust trails or staining down the chimney exterior. Water that gets past a failing cap carries dissolved metal and creosote down the brick, leaving orange or black streaks. By the time you see those streaks from the ground, the cap has been leaking for at least a season.
• Rainwater in the firebox after storms. This is the clearest sign the cap or its seal is gone. Water pools in the firebox, rusts the damper, and soaks into the firebrick. Left alone through one more Flushing winter, that water freezes and expands inside the masonry.
• Animal sounds from the chimney. Squirrels and raccoons don’t need a big opening. A cap with missing mesh or a lifted corner is an open door. They’ll nest, block the flue, and leave you with a dead animal and a smoke backup the first time you light a fire.
• Draft problems that got worse recently. A cap that’s partially collapsed or blocked kills the draft. If your fireplace smoked fine last year and now pushes smoke into the room, the cap is on the list of first things we check.
• You can see missing mesh or a tilted cap from the ground. Mesh corrodes faster than the cap body, especially near the Sound. Once the mesh is gone, the cap no longer does its spark-arrest job, and it’s a code issue if you’re in one of the denser attached-home blocks near Flushing Town Hall where roof clearances are tight.

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Replacement Cost & What’s Included

In Flushing, you’re looking at these numbers for an Olympia Chimney-compatible cap installation:

• Standard single-flue cap (Sure-Seal or equivalent): $340-$480 installed
• Round liner cap (RainRunner style): $290-$410 installed
• Multi-flue cap (Sentinel style, two or three flues): $520-$680 installed
• Custom adapter plate for odd flue sizes: add $80-$140

Every quote includes the cap, stainless mounting hardware, removal of the old cap, and a written warranty on the installation. What drives the range is access: a single-story with a walkable roof is quick, while a three-story attached Flushing home with a steep pitch means more setup time and safety rigging. We write the number down before we touch anything. No surprises after the fact.

We also camera-scan the flue while we’re up there, because a failed cap is often the first sign of water damage below. You get the photos before you pay, and you decide what’s urgent and what can wait.

DIY or Call Us?

If you can safely get on your roof and you’re just checking the cap, look for missing mesh, rust around the seam where the cap meets the flue, and any tilt. Those are all visible from roof level. If the cap is sound and the mesh is intact, your problem is probably elsewhere and you don’t need to spend on a new cap.

Where DIY goes wrong is the roof itself. Most chimney caps in Flushing are on attached homes with real pitch, and a fall from even a one-story roof can put you in the hospital. The other failure point we see is the wrong-size cap - someone buys a 13×13 online, it doesn’t seat, they shim it with something improvised, and it blows off in the first nor’easter. If you’d rather someone else handle the ladder and the measurements, call (516) 240-9191 and we’ll bring the caps with us.

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