Why does everyone skip the cleanout tee at the bottom?

Last Tuesday I pulled a full cap off a customer's cleanout in Spokane and found 3 inches of hard packed creosote and a dead squirrel blocking the whole thing. They had a sweep come through 8 months ago who just ran a brush from the top and never once checked the tee, so all that junk had nowhere to go except backing up into the flue. I see this at least twice a month, usually on houses built before 1985 where the tee is hidden behind a panel in the basement. How do you all convince homeowners to let you access that spot when it means moving their storage or cutting a small access door? Has anyone else found a trick for getting them to say yes without a fight?

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elizabeth_bailey261mo ago

Gonna be honest, that’s on the sweep for not doing the job right. The tee is part of the system and if they skipped it they didn’t actually clean the flue. But the dead squirrel part tells me the cap was already messed up or missing, so no amount of tee access fixes that if the critters are getting in from the bottom. I get that you want to cut a door and get in there, but most homeowners will say no because they don’t want holes in their drywall or to dig out their storage for a “maybe” problem. My trick is to show them the damage from the last job with pictures, then offer to install a proper cleanout cap that’s actually reachable. If they still say no, then I just put it in writing that they refused the service and move on. Blaming the homeowner for your access issue feels backwards when the last guy already proved the system was unreliable.