Chimney repair and sweeping in Middlesex County, NJ

What we find across Middlesex County

Middlesex County straddles a real geological line: the northwest, including parts of Edison and New Brunswick, sits on Piedmont shale and sandstone once quarried locally as brownstone, while the southeast, including Perth Amboy, sits on the sandier, clay-bearing Coastal Plain. That split matters less for the chimney work itself than the housing does. New Brunswick and Perth Amboy are old, dense cities — 71.0 and 63.2 percent of their housing sits in buildings of two units or more — where a chimney is as likely to be building-scale as a single house's own flue. Edison runs the other way: 60.6 percent single-family, mostly built in the 1950-to-1989 postwar boom, the kind of house that got one interior chimney for one furnace. Gas heat dominates all three towns today, from 58.9 percent in New Brunswick up to 83.2 percent in Edison, but each city still has households on fuel oil, and since October 2025 every one of them falls under the same 2024 IRC fireplace and chimney clearance rules — 6 inches, down from 12 and 8 — no matter which town the job is in.