A chimney sweep's year has a shape most trades would find strange. Through spring and summer the phone is quiet enough that a crew can take whatever comes in, wherever it is. Then the first cold night arrives and everyone who meant to get their flue cleaned in July calls in the same week.
That demand curve is the first scheduling problem. The second is the roof. A sweep or an inspection that needs roof access can't happen in rain, ice or high wind, so the forecast cancels jobs that were perfectly booked. The third is easy to miss: when the calendar fills, the jobs you take are scattered across the whole territory, and the drive between them grows just as the number of hours you can sell shrinks.
This page covers how to plan around all three, and what chimney sweep scheduling software has to do to help.
The fall rush is a geography problem
In a quiet month, nobody notices that Tuesday's two sweeps were 40 minutes apart. There is slack in the day to absorb it.
In the rush, every open slot gets sold, and it gets sold to whoever called, from wherever they called. If you book in the order the phone rings, a crew's day can zigzag from one side of the county to the other. Each job is an hour or so on site. Each drive between them might be 30 or 40 minutes. The share of the day spent driving, your windshield time, climbs right when you can least afford it.
The fix is not to work faster on the roof. It's to decide where each crew is going to be on each day before the rush, and fill those days from the same neighbourhood. The field service capacity planning guide covers sizing crews for a season like this.
Pre-season zone days
A simple method that works well for chimney companies:
- In late summer, split your territory into a handful of zones you can drive across in 15 to 20 minutes.
- Assign each crew-day in the rush a zone.
- When a customer calls, offer the next days that crew will be in their zone first. Only offer a "wrong zone" day if they can't wait, and only if the drive from the previous job really fits.
This is zone scheduling, and it turns the rush from a scatter into a set of tight loops. It also makes it easier to tell a customer, honestly, when you can reach them.
Weather turns bookings into reschedules
Rain is the chimney trade's version of a no-show, except it hits every roof job at once. If a front comes through on Thursday, every crew's Thursday is now Friday's problem, or next week's.
Two habits keep a rain day from wrecking the week:
- Mark which jobs need the roof. A camera inspection from the firebox, a damper repair or an insert consult may still go ahead in drizzle. Roof-access jobs can't. If the board knows which is which, a rain morning becomes a reshuffle (pull the indoor work forward) instead of a blank day.
- Rebook into the same zone. When a rained-out job moves, put it on the next day that crew is already in that area. Rebooking into the first open slot anywhere is how a reshuffled week grows extra drive time.
Track how often this happens. Your rescheduling rate through the season tells you how much buffer to leave in late autumn, when the forecast is worst and the demand is highest.
A worked example: one rain morning
This is an illustrative example. The numbers are made up to show the arithmetic; run the same check on your own board.
A two-person crew has four sweeps booked on Thursday in the north zone, each about 75 minutes on site, with 15-minute drives between them. Rain is forecast until noon. The office wants to save the day by pulling forward an indoor job and rebooking the morning roofs.
In the first version, the crew spends 80 minutes driving to save one hour of indoor work, and Monday picks up an extra cross-town leg. In the second, the morning is shorter but cheaper, and nothing else in the week moves. Across a season of rain days, that difference adds up to whole crew-days.
Inspections lead to repair work
A sweep often finds something: a cracked crown, a failed flashing, a liner that needs replacing. That turns a 75-minute visit into a quote and then a multi-hour repair, sometimes with a second person and materials.
Book repair work differently from sweeps:
- Repairs have a longer and less certain job duration estimate. Give them a full block, not a sweep-sized slot.
- They usually need roof access for longer, so they are even more weather-sensitive. Hold them for the most reliable days in your forecast.
- Masonry and liner work often happens in the quiet months if the customer can wait. Moving repairs out of the rush frees fall capacity for sweeps that can't wait.
Roofing companies run into the same weather and access constraints on a larger scale; see roofing scheduling. Trades that ride the same seasonal ladder-and-roof calendar, like gutter cleaning, face a similar autumn squeeze.
How CrewLink handles chimney sweep scheduling
CrewLink builds live travel time into availability. When a customer asks for a time, the only slots it offers are ones a crew can physically reach, with travel computed from where the crew will actually be (the previous job) rather than from the shop.
That matters most in the rush. On the dispatch board, drive time sits next to each job instead of being hidden inside a block. When a rain morning forces a reshuffle, you can see which rebooking adds a cross-town leg and which one doesn't before you call the customer back. The method behind it is laid out in travel-time scheduling.
It's built for companies running 5 to 50 trucks. When we walk you through it, we use your own territory and your own service times.
What it doesn't do: CrewLink doesn't read the weather, write inspection reports, store chimney photos, quote repairs or take payments. It's a scheduling and dispatch tool. You decide which jobs move on a rain day; it checks that the new day is one your crews can actually drive.
What to take away
- The fall rush makes jobs scattered, and scattered jobs grow drive time just as selling hours get scarce.
- Assign zones to crew-days before the season, then fill each day from its zone first.
- Mark which jobs need roof access so a rain day is a reshuffle, not a cancellation.
- Rebook rained-out jobs into the next day the crew is already nearby.
- Push repair work to quieter months where the customer can wait.
Common questions
How do I schedule chimney sweeps during the fall rush?
Start before it arrives. Divide the territory into zones, assign each crew-day a zone, and offer callers the next day a crew is in their area first. Count the drive from the previous job before confirming any slot outside that zone.
How many chimney sweeps can a crew do in a day?
Use your own numbers. Take the working hours, subtract breaks and the morning and evening drive, then divide by average time on site plus the average drive between jobs. Run it twice: once with your quiet-season drive times and once with your rush-season ones, since scattered bookings change the answer. The jobs per day calculator runs the same arithmetic.
What should I do with booked jobs on a rain day?
Sort them into roof-access and indoor work. Keep the indoor work if it's nearby, and move roof jobs to the next day the same crew is in the same zone rather than the first open slot anywhere. Tell customers early, because a morning call is easier to accept than a no-show.
Should chimney repairs and sweeps share a calendar?
Yes, if the same crews do both. Book them as different job types, though, with repairs getting longer blocks and the most reliable weather days, so they don't get squeezed into sweep-sized slots during the rush.