The first cold evening in late September, half of Dublin lights the fire, and the other half remembers the chimney has not been done since the year before. The search is “chimney sweep near me” or “stove cleaning Dublin”, it happens after nine at night, and the person wants a date, a price and a sense that you will not leave soot on the carpet. If we had to sum up websites for chimney sweeps in Dublin in one line: they should take the booking, say the price, and show a clean hearth. Almost none do, which is good news for the sweep who gets it right.
Ten weeks that make the year
A sweep’s calendar is the most lopsided in the trades. From mid-September to the end of November the phone does not stop, and you are doing jobs back to back across the city. Then a steady trickle through the winter, nests and blockages in spring, and a quiet summer when nobody thinks about the fire.
The site has to work hardest in those ten weeks. It carries your real availability, so the person searching at nine at night can see Thursday morning is free and take it. It says you are booked up for the week in Clontarf but have slots in Finglas. It makes the quiet months useful too, with a line in May saying summer is the sensible time to have the chimney done before the rush, and a nest check for anyone who heard scratching in April.
A price list, a certificate and a clean sitting room
Chimney sweeping has something most trades do not: a simple price list. Open fire, stove, inset stove, solid fuel range, a second flue in the same house, a nest removed, a cowl fitted, a CCTV inspection if you offer one. Write it all down. People compare sweeps on price and on mess, and a page with the prices on it wins the first comparison before you have said a word.
Then the certificate. Say you issue one after every sweep and that some home insurers want to see it. Say what you check while you are there, the draw, the pot, the state of the liner, and that you tell the customer if something needs a roofer or a stove fitter rather than a sweep.
And the mess. The biggest worry people have about letting a sweep in is the sitting room afterwards. A photo of the dust sheets down, the vacuum running on the flue, and the hearth clean when you are done answers it. A line about how you work keeps you clean, and it is the thing customers mention to the neighbours.
Booking a slot at nine at night
You cannot answer the phone with your arm up a flue, and you cannot ring twenty people back at six o’clock either. The booking page does it for you. The customer picks the service, sees the real slots, books, and gets a reminder the day before. If they need to move it, they do that themselves. You open the diary in the van and it is full, grouped by area if you set it up that way, with no double bookings from a notebook. The setup is explained in how to take online bookings.
For a trade with a short season and a lot of small jobs, that is the difference between a full October and one with gaps you never knew about.
The review that gets you the next street
Sweeps get work by word of mouth more than almost any trade. One good job in a road and three neighbours ring. Google reviews are that conversation written down where strangers can see it. After each visit the customer gets a short text with a direct link to your review page. They are relieved, the fire is drawing, and they say so. You never have to ask across the hearth, and we draft replies for you to approve.
Stoves, nests, cowls and the questions you answer on the step
Do you do stoves. Do you do the flue on an oil boiler. Can you get a nest out. How long does it take. Do we need to be there. Do you do it in summer. The answers go on the page in plain words, so the people who book already know, and the people who ring have shorter questions. If a job turns out to be a liner or a stove install, a heating engineer is who you send them to, and the pages can point at each other.
What we need from a sweep
Your price list. Your areas and roughly how you group them by day. Your usual hours and how far ahead you book. A few photos: the van, you at work, the clean hearth afterwards. Whether you issue certificates and do CCTV inspections. Ten minutes on the phone, ideally in August.
Which plan and what it costs
For the autumn rush and the reviews, Complete is the plan we would pick: €1,499 to set up and €100 a month, no contract, VAT on top. A sweep who is happy taking the calls and keeping a paper diary can run on Essentials at €499 and €50 a month. Both are on the pricing page.