Doug Dow, owner of Doug’s Top Hat Chimney Sweep, brushed the walls of a fireplace in the country club area last week. Dow is a retired Lincoln firefighter.

With a running vacuum cleaner Doug Dow, owner of Doug’s Top Hat Chimney Sweep, cleaned the walls of a fireplace in the country club area last week.

Doug Dow’s chimney sweep brush is the busiest this time of year.

The retired Lincoln firefighter works full-time cleaning chimneys and regularly does five jobs a day at Doug’s Top Hat Chimney Sweep.

“I’m trying to slow down, but I’m out of luck,” said the 66-year-old.

Lincoln firefighters Bob Reynolds and Derald Murrell founded the company in 1978, and Dow joined 10 years later.

He ran Top Hat Chimney Sweeps with Lincoln firefighter Greg Contreras for several years, but now they both run separate businesses called Top Hat.

When Dow was working as a firefighter driving oil rigs out of Station 9 in Bethany, he did six or seven sweeping jobs a day on his days off.

Doug Dow

Courtesy photo

Driving rigs made him feel like a racing driver, he said. As a chimney sweep, he feels like a family dentist.

“It’s like brushing your teeth,” said Dow. “You brush out the inside of the chimney and clean all the soot in there.”

He never guarantees that there won’t be a problem after cleaning a chimney, but his goal is to mitigate a problem by reducing the combustible material inside that could start a fire, he said.

Over the weekend, a dirty wood stove lit a fire and caused $ 10,000 damage to a Martell home, Lancaster County Sheriff Terry Wagner said.

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