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Why and when should you clean your chimney? The why behind a cleaning a chimney is to prevent chimney fires. When you burn wood in your fireplace, that builds up gases and the gases don't all completely burn 'cause not enough oxygen gets around the fire and these gases combine with the smoke and they go up in the chimney.
When it gets to the cooler chimney, these gases condense and form on the walls and build up a product which called creosote. Some people know this as soot. Crea soot is a highly flammable material, and if you get that catches on fire, there's plenty of oxygen in the flu that it really burns fast and hot.
If you see it from the top, it looks like the bottom side of a rocket. So this extremely hot fire burning in the chimney, it can destroy the chimney and in extreme cases, catch the house on fire. So the main reason is for safety, then to keep the house from catching on fire from chimney fires.
When should you get your chimney clean? We recommend that you should have your chimney inspected annually and then clean it as needed, and the cleaning part of it. If you burn once, uh, every night through the winter, then it should be cleaned once a year. If you burn every other night through the winter, then once every two years, and if you burn just occasionally, then once every three years.
The inspection part of this makes sure that there isn't any problems with the chimney itself, especially in our area with the seismic activity and stuff, you can get cracks from the thing just sitting there, even if you're not using it. So the inspection makes sure that there's, there's no cracks or issues that can make the fireplace unsafe.