What a central Connecticut winter does to the brick at the top of your house
A chimney in Newington absorbs punishment that has nothing to do with how many fires you light. The masonry stands fully exposed to the whole arc of a Hartford County year, the muggy stretch of a valley summer, the cold rain that arrives off every passing front, and then the long run of nights where the temperature crosses the freezing line and back again. Brick and mortar are porous by nature, so they pull in moisture during the wet weeks, and the moment that water locks up as ice it swells and works the masonry apart from within. Each freeze widens the gaps another fraction, and the crown at the very peak, the most weather-beaten surface on the entire structure, is almost always the first piece to surrender.
The burning months pile a second, wholly different wear on top of the first. Every log you burn lays creosote down the inside of the flue, a sticky, combustible film that thickens in coats and squeezes the channel the smoke is meant to climb. A flue even partly glazed with hardened creosote is at once a fire risk and a draft problem, since the very deposit that can ignite also strangles the airflow the fire needs to run clean. So the two forces attack from opposite ends at the same time, water and frost prying at the structure from the crown down while creosote gathers in the flue from the firebox up, and that is precisely why a chimney here needs a look on a schedule rather than only after something has plainly gone wrong.