Adventures in Combustion

One week in December, a huge cold front came in with rain, snow, fog, and temperatures in the 30's. Naturally, this was when our natural gas furnace, which has been on the fritz, decided to go out. It had been doing this thing where it went off during the day, since it got warm enough not to need much heat, and then sometimes it came on at night and sometimes it didn't. When it didn't, we would wake up in the night to find it getting slowly colder, so we would turn on the space heater in our bedroom and wait until morning. Usually as soon as the sun came up, it came on again. This time it decided not to. Lauren and I hung out in the toasty bedroom, waiting for the repair guys and making occasional forays into the cold house for food. Finally in the afternoon they came, climbed up on the roof in the blowing flurries and reported that the control circuit was fried. $300 and an hour later, we had a new control circuit and heat. Yea!

We also have a fireplace – well, I would call it an insert except there is no actual fireplace. Freestanding wood burning stove, I guess. Anyway, it had never been cleaned, as far as we could tell, so we didn't want to try using it until cleaning out the creosote buildup. We bought a chimney brush, Jim went up on the roof, but it fell in as he was trying to screw on the extension, necessitating dismantling the entire chimney. He and his brother accomplished this task the next weekend, cleaned out lots of black crumblies, and amazingly managed to trample very little black on the new carpet. On the evening of the day the furnace was fixed, we tried it out. It was swell – the draft worked great, the fire was beautiful, lots of heat from only a few pieces of wood, no fire in the attic...

Until we noticed smoke coming out of the holes the front of the stove where the circulation fan vents. Not wood smoke, nasty white burning plastic smoke. It turns out that the small children who had previously lived in the house liked to stick things into little holes, and as the metal heated up, the mystery objects began to smolder. The smoke quickly billowed up to the ceiling and spread from there, with no way to turn it off. Jim tried screwdrivers and kitchen knives to no avail, then finally fashioned a hook from a metal hanger and was able to extract some candy and two ball point pens, the latter being the nasty smoke producing culprits. We let the fire die down and opened the entire house, letting in the 30 degree weather. Good thing it could now be heated back up again with the furnace! We made plans to make a thorough inspection with the stove cooled off before lighting a fire in it again.

Nothing more was visible. The next time there were very small plastic smoke whiffs, but nothing much to speak of. Success! We roasted marsh mellows and hot dogs, and boiled water with cinnamon in a pot on top to toast our success.

Now a month or so later, our heating has again gone on the fritz. Naturally, this was Saturday night on a three day weekend. We holed up with a space heater in the bedroom, and then Jim built a fire with wood we had bought for just such an emergency. It warmed the house well enough that we haven't been moved to call the repair guys on a Sunday. We closed all of the other doors, and with a space heater in the bedroom, a fire in the living room, and cooking chicken corn chowder and biscuits for dinner to heat up the kitchen. Jim just sawed up all of the scrap wood that was lying around the back porch from various projects, which should keep us in fires for a little while. Will we call them on a holiday Monday, or wait until Tuesday? I guess it depends how fast the wood burns.