Meet the Team - Hearthstone Chimney Co.

Meet the Plainview Team Behind Hearthstone Chimney Co.

Our Plainview crew isn’t a rotating cast of subcontractors. These are the same faces who show up year after year, carrying the same tool bags, remembering which house on Hampton Road has the tricky flue offset and which ranch in Bethpage had the squirrel situation last March. We’re chimney people. We don’t do gutters, we don’t do roofing, and we don’t send a sales crew ahead of the technicians. What unites us is simple: we were all hired because we’d rather do one thing right than ten things halfway.

Call (934) 348-4832

Our People

Russell Haines, Owner

I’ve been running Hearthstone since 1984, which means I’ve swept chimneys through forty-two winters on Long Island and seen every kind of creosote buildup this climate can produce. I started the company after working three seasons for a sweep in Syosset who taught me that the real job isn’t the brushing, it’s the looking - getting your eyes on every surface and telling the homeowner exactly what you found, even when they’d rather not hear it. I’m still NFI-certified for woodburning and gas systems, and I personally review every Level-2 camera inspection report before it goes out. My dry observation, which I’ve earned the right to make: the homeowner who says “we barely use it” is almost always the one with the cracked liner and the bird’s nest in the smoke chamber. I live in Nassau County, my truck’s parked in Plainview, and I plan to be here in thirty more years. That changes how you treat people.

Mike D., Lead Technician

Mike’s been with us for eleven years and runs the crew on every multi-day liner job and rebuild. He’s CSIA-certified and holds factory training from DuraFlex and Olympia Chimney, which matters when you’re dropping a stainless liner down a three-story colonial in Plainview with a 45-degree offset. Mike’s the one who figured out how to access the chimney on that 1920s Tudor on Manetto Hill without scaffolding - engineered a custom rig from chimney rods and a GoPro that we still use. Off the clock, he restores vintage motorcycles in a garage so packed with parts that his wife makes him park in the driveway. He owns exactly three dress shirts and wears one to every annual company dinner.

Teresa V., Senior Installer & Cap Specialist

Teresa handles our Gelco and Famco cap and crown installations, plus the custom copper work when a homeowner wants something that’ll outlast them. She’s been with Hearthstone for seven years, came to us from a sheet metal shop in Farmingdale, and she’s still the only person I trust to fabricate a chase cover that doesn’t pond water. Her HeatShield certification means she also does the refractory resurfacing jobs where we’re saving a clay flue liner that’s structurally sound but pitted. Teresa grew up in a house with a wood stove in Massapequa, so she actually understands why people fight over who gets to load the logs. She keeps a notebook of every custom cap she’s built, with sketches, because she says she doesn’t trust the photos to show the angle right.

Darnell J., Service Coordinator

Darnell’s voice is the one you’ll hear when you call (934) 348-4832 at 10 PM on a Saturday or 7 AM on a Tuesday. He’s been our dispatcher and coordinator for four years, and he knows the Plainview service area well enough to route three crews around Long Island traffic without putting anyone on the Southern State during rush hour. Before Hearthstone, he ran logistics for a HVAC company in Hicksville, so he understands the difference between a “sometime Thursday” appointment and a real arrival window. Darnell’s the one who calls you thirty minutes out, every time, because he knows waiting around for a contractor is its own kind of job. He coaches youth basketball in Levittown and applies the same patience to explaining chimney codes to anxious new homeowners.

Emma R., Apprentice Technician

Emma joined us last season after completing the chimney technology program at a trade school in Suffolk County. She’s working toward her CSIA certification and currently shadows Mike on inspections, handles the initial brushing and prep work, and has become our go-to for dryer vent cleaning and the straightforward single-flue sweeps in ranch houses. Emma’s sharp with the camera rig and has a good eye for spalling brick that she’s still learning to trust. She grew up in Plainview, which means she actually knows which neighborhoods have the pre-war construction with the unlined chimneys and which developments put in zero-clearance fireplaces that homeowners mistake for masonry. She asks more questions than the rest of us combined, which is exactly what you want in someone who’ll be running her own truck in a few years.

One Standard, Every Job

The Plainview crew answers to the same standard as every Hearthstone technician across our network: the 90-Day Done Right Promise, backed in writing with no arguing. K.E.Y.S. isn’t a poster in the break room. It’s how Mike checks his liner measurements twice. It’s how Teresa won’t sign off on a crown that doesn’t shed water to her own satisfaction. It’s how Darnell will stay on the phone with you until every question is answered, even if the office line’s ringing. We’re licensed and insured, background-checked and uniformed, and we complete most jobs in a single visit because we’ve seen enough chimneys to know what we’re walking into. The brands in our trucks - DuraFlex, HeatShield, Gelco, Olympia Chimney, Famco, Copperfield - are the same ones we specify on every estimate. No substitutes, no surprises on the bill. Done right, and we stand behind it.

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