This longtime Fairhaven business owner is ready to stop climbing on roofs
After 40 years running a business that included climbing on roofs, Tom Oyen is ready to take a break.
Oyen closed The Chimney Sweep on 913 Harris Ave. at the end of December 2019. He’s spending the month of January 2020 at the Fairhaven storefront tying up loose ends and getting rid of the things he’s accumulated since opening the business in 1979 with Thom Prichard.
The business started while the nation was in the midst of an energy crisis, so wood-burning stoves were hot sellers. Those chimneys also needed to be cleaned, and the company eventually had nine trucks handling the demand.
Oyen said he had 61 employees over the years, handling a dirty, dangerous job. He said the younger crew members tended to enjoy being on the roof, cleaning the chimneys from the top down. Those with more experience tended to clean from the bottom of the chimney up, a trickier but safer technique.
Chimney sweeping was mostly a seasonal service, with homeowners tending to think about getting it done between August and January. For the rest of the year the business usually focused on the sale and installation of stoves. In the 1970s the stoves used to belch out 40-60 grams of particles per hour; by the 1980s Clean Sweep found stoves that cut that rate to 11 grams per hour.
As natural gas became less expensive, the company brought on more gas stove models. Oyen said about three years ago he scaled back the operation to a two-man business, with longtime employee Howard Lopeman. Last year it was just Oyen, and he felt ready to close the business.
“The universe is telling me that it’s time,” Oyen said.
For now, Oyen is in the store part-time, clearing out the space. He sold his website, which was one of the first for that industry and had hundreds of articles he wrote, to Hearth.com. He’s selling or giving away other things in the store, including a 1916 brass cash register.
Oyen will have plenty of memories as he settles into retirement. The last customer to buy a stove from him just happened to be one of the first to make a purchase when the store opened.
Another customer walked in around a month ago and asked two questions before deciding on a stove. Oyen was puzzled, wondering why he wasn’t asking for more details. The customer replied that he had bought one there 30 years ago and it did what the young man had said it would do, so he trusted the business. They both figured out that it was a younger Oyen who sold it to him.
Oyen said that’s what really warmed his heart: Selling products that would be a part of the home for so long.
“I had grandchildren of original customers buying stoves,” he said about the final months of Chimney Sweep.
