Meet the Team - Hearthstone Chimney Co.

Meet the Staten Island Team Behind Hearthstone Chimney Co.

We’re the crew that shows up at your door in Staten Island when your flue needs sweeping, your liner’s failing, or your crown’s cracked clean through. Most of us have been at this long enough to remember when Tottenville still had more chimneys than central heat, and we all answer to the same standard: done right, and we stand behind it. Russell Haines built this team on the K.E.Y.S. code, and it’s how we treat every job from Great Kills to New Brighton.

Call (516) 613-3035

Our People

Russell Haines, Owner

I’ve been running Hearthstone since 1984, back when Staten Island had more farmland than traffic circles and every house on the South Shore seemed to burn wood through April. I started sweeping chimneys because I liked working with my hands and I couldn’t stand watching homeowners get talked into work they didn’t need. Forty-two years later, I’m still climbing ladders when the job calls for it, still writing estimates in plain English, and still answering the phone myself some nights just to hear what’s going on out there. The K.E.Y.S. values, the 90-Day Done Right Promise, the camera inspections with photos you can see, all of it came from one bad experience I had as a young tech, watching a customer get burned by a company that vanished after the check cleared. I swore Hearthstone would be the opposite. My wife says I talk about flue gases at dinner. She’s not wrong.

Mike D., Lead Technician

Mike’s been with us fourteen years, and he’s the guy we send when a chimney’s throwing smoke back into the living room and three other companies have given up. He’s CSIA-certified and holds a Level-2 inspection credential, but what matters more is that he’ll spend twenty minutes explaining to a homeowner in Westerleigh exactly why their draft is failing, using a flashlight and a piece of scrap liner to show them. He grew up in a 1920s Tudor in Dongan Hills with a coal-converted fireplace that never worked right, which is probably why he obsesses over proper sizing. Off hours, he restores vintage motorcycles and applies the same patience to a 1973 Honda that he does to a crumbling smoke chamber. He once found a raccoon nesting above a damper in Annadale, and the photo still circulates in our group chat.

Carla R., Senior Installer

Carla runs our liner and rebuild crews, and she’s the only person I know who can thread a DuraFlex stainless liner down a three-story flue in a Port Richmond rowhouse without cursing once. She’s been doing chimney work for eleven years, certified in HeatShield cerfractory flue repair and trained on Olympia Chimney’s full product line. Before she joined us, she spent five years in commercial HVAC, which means she sees the whole system, not just the brick column. Homeowners in Emerson Hill like her because she tells them straight when a liner can wait a season and when it absolutely cannot. She lives in Stapleton with two rescue dogs and a wood stove she installed herself, which she sweeps every March whether it needs it or not. Her pet peeve is contractors who cap chimneys without checking for condensation traps first.

Derek T., Service Coordinator

Derek’s the voice you get when you call (516) 613-3035 at 10 PM on a Saturday because you smelled something odd from the fireplace. He’s been with Hearthstone six years, and he knows our schedule, our parts inventory, and the Staten Island ferry schedule well enough to route technicians around rush-hour backups to Great Kills. He’s not a tech, but he’s sat through enough of our training sessions to ask the right questions on that first call and flag whether you’re describing a routine sweep or something that needs Mike same-day. He grew up in New Dorp, worked hotel front desks through college, and treats every caller like they’re checking into somewhere that matters. He keeps a map of Staten Island’s historic districts taped to his desk so he knows which jobs might need landmark preservation awareness before we bid. His coffee order is unnecessarily complicated, and we give him grief for it daily.

Jasmine K., Apprentice Technician

Jasmine’s in her second year with us, splitting time between ride-alongs and formal training through the Chimney Safety Institute. She’s already certified in basic sweeping and Famco cap installation, and she’s working toward her Level-2 inspection credential. We hired her after she finished a masonry program at a trade school in Queens and called our office three times asking questions about flue gases that most journeymen don’t think to ask. She grew up in a rental in Mariners Harbor with a landlord who never swept the chimney, which is how she learned what carbon monoxide symptoms look like in a teenager who doesn’t know any better. She takes photos of every job stage for her own learning, and she’s gotten good enough that Carla uses some of them in customer reports. She lives with her grandmother in Graniteville and is quietly saving to buy a fixer-upper with a working fireplace, which she has already promised to sweep properly.

One Standard, Every Job

Every person on this page, from the apprentice to the owner, works under the same Keystone Standard. That means the 90-Day Done Right Promise applies whether Mike’s rebuilding your crown or Jasmine’s doing her first solo cap install. It means background-checked, uniformed techs with no-hassle upfront pricing, the number on the estimate matching the number on the invoice. It means professional-grade materials from DuraFlex, HeatShield, Gelco, Olympia Chimney, Famco, and Copperfield, never a builder-grade substitute because we could get away with it. We’ve been serving Staten Island for over forty-two years, and we plan to be here thirty more, which means we don’t burn relationships for a quick job. When we say we’ll be there when we say, we mean it. When we hand you photos from a Level-2 camera inspection and a plain-English verdict, we’re documenting like engineers and explaining like craftsmen because that’s what you need to make a real decision about your home. Done right, and we stand behind it. In writing, no arguing.

Written by Russell Haines, Owner at Hearthstone Chimney Co., serving Staten Island since 1984.