CHIMNEY SWEEP REACHES FOR TOP

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 26, 1992                   TAG: 9201270195
SECTION: NEW RIVER VALLEY ECONOMY                    PAGE: 37   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: Joe Tennis
DATELINE: PILOT                                LENGTH: Medium
CHIMNEY SWEEP REACHES FOR TOP
Ron Spencer has a cold job keeping people warm.
The 30-year-old is a chimney sweep. Sometimes he stands two stories high on a ladder, sometimes in 30-degree temperatures, to run flat wire brushes and fiberglass rods through chimneys.
Chimney-sweeping is a seasonal business, starting in August and ending in January.
Spencer charges $55 per sweep and cleans about six a week. Each takes two or three hours.
In addition, he holds a full-time, $25,000-a-year job as a nitroglycerin operator at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant.
He started Spencer's Chimney Sweep a year ago to support his family while his wife, Connie, stays home to tend the couple's three children, Matthew, Andrew and Whitney.
"One job is just not enough," he said. "You've got to have two jobs to make it."
The family lives in Pilot in a remodeled house that had a flue fire a few years ago. A fire broke out in the the chimney and spread through cracks in the bricks.
Such fires - which feed on deposits of soot, creosote and dust on the chimney walls - usually are caused when people let their stoves burn all day on low "to get the most of their wood," Spencer said.
To protect against flue fires, Spencer suggests that a chimney should be cleaned annually. Otherwise, it could "get into the house and burn the house down," he warns.
Spencer learned some of the business doing some part-time chimney cleaning with his father, Charlie Spencer. He continues to learn more by consulting a thick, three-ring handbook published by August-West System.
His job is not without mishaps. Once while on a 32-foot ladder leaning against a chimney in Floyd, Spencer reached for the chimney's top brick - and it came off.
He didn't fall, but he says he got out of the incident only by "prayer. . . . That's the closest I've come to falling off."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB