LM Richardson Certified Chimney Sweep

I had wonderful service today from LM Richardson: They arrived promptly (but not early). They answered all of my questions in detail. They told me that one of the services I’d asked for was not necessary, and reduced the charge accordingly. They gave me excellent advice on how to proceed going forward. And they were scrupulously clean and professional.
LM Richardson has my enthusiastic recommendation.

I am surprised to see any negative reports via LR Richardson’s chimney cleaning company, because we have used him for at least 15 years and have had exemplary service. We first started using this company when we were in our former house and we called for a 2^nd opinion because we had been given an estimate from another company who said we needed a liner for our chimney (which was very expensive). Mr. Richardson gave us a detailed explanation why this was not needed. In those first years of service, he also took the time to teach me the best way to make a fire! The last time we had our chimney cleaned, two other employees came to do the work. They seemed very competent as well and were pleasant and cleaned up the area. My only concern is that someday Mr. Richardson will retire!

Horrible customer service and a crappy job… go else where…

After reading all the 5 star reviews about A Certified Chimney Sweep on Kudzu and Citysearch I decided to give them a call. Too bad there were none on Unilocal yet.
I called and scheduled a chimney sweep and inspection for $ 169. The arrived when they were to do the sweep and inspection, they were about 30 minutes late showing up but that was ok as the traffic in Buckhead really sucks sometimes. I wasn’t at home during the sweep process so I left my girl in charge of making sure they did a good job. After they were finished sweeping and inspecting the chimney they told her that we needed a screen on the smoke stack that they would be happy to provide for an additional $ 125. We decided against that and I am glad I did.
Come the next day after the sweep we are having a party at the house and wanted to fire up the fireplace before the guest arrived to create a nice atmosphere for our guests, so I put in a couple of logs and lit them up. To our dismay the entire house filled with smoke (yes I did have the damper open); the chimney was not drawing the smoke out. This pissed me off since I had given them $ 169 to make sure the chimney was clean and thought the inspection would have been good enough to make sure something like this didn’t happen. The entire house smells awful, even 2 weeks later.
I called the following Monday and asked if they could come back out. I later received a call from the guy who cleaned the chimney saying he would be out that day. I went home and waited for him to show up, he called again saying it would be the next day before he could get out there. I waited the next day and he called saying he would not be able to make it out again. He promised to call me the next day when he was on his way out, but the call never came.
We will be calling them back out again. Depending on if they show up or if they fix the chimney to work this review might get updated. Until then, 2 stars is way more than fair for this company as you can always buy a groupon deal to have your chimney swept for $ 99 from another company.