February 10, 2004

• Stack Fire

  
  

  What woke me around 6:30 this morning was an unfamiliar sound:  pffft…pffft…pffft…pffft.  Well, it’s not all that unfamiliar.  A little too familiar for my taste.

  
  

  It’s the sound my plant mister makes.  Doug was using the mister to cool the ceiling around the stovepipe.  He had been putting wood in the fire when a bit of metal that seals the joint between the cast iron door and the glass window in it, fell off.  It has happened to me a few times.  It usually means a hotter-than-usual fire for a while, from a greater-than-usual flow of air.  Then when the fire dies down and the stove cools enough to work with, I put the thing back in place.  I still haven’t done that this time.  The stove is still too hot to touch.

  
  

  This time, things got hot enough inside the stovepipe to ignite the creosote built up in there.  Fortunately, a few days ago when Doug was on the roof shoveling snow, he took our all-purpose tool, the Mutt, up there and knocked loose a collection of creosote that had the pipe nearly choked off near the roofline.  If he hadn’t done that, there would have been more fuel in there for the fire, and more danger of a roof fire.  When we do the full job of stovepipe cleaning we let the fire go out first and go up there with the vacuum cleaner and suck the loose creosote out.  This time the weather was too cold to let the fire go out.  The creosote he knocked loose fell to the horizontal baffle at the top of the firebox.  I used my bent coat hanger tool to rake enough of it down into the fire to clear a channel to let the smoke out.  The rest of the job was being deferred until warmer weather.  Now it won’t need to be done for even longer.  The creosote has burned up.  Neat how that works, eh?

  
  

  Since it hadn’t been a thorough pipe-cleaning this time, there was still some creosote in the upper portion of the pipe, too.  When I woke, it was burning with a roar, a big whooshing rumble in the pipe.  That’s why Doug had been misting the ceiling.  One day a few years ago I woke early and stoked the stove, then went back to bed, forgetting in my sleepy state to close the damper.  That morning the fire got hot, ignited the creosote in the pipe and what woke me that time had been the crackle of the flames as the ceiling burned.  After I knocked down the flames with the chemical fire extinguisher, Doug had used that same mister to “mop up” the fire: kill all the smoldering material in the ceiling tiles.

  
  

  It is a small plant mister, only holds about 8-10 ounces of water.  I went looking for my bigger spray bottle even before he said he was running low on water.  I found it, filled it, and then discovered that the pump malfunctioned.  It would pump a spray or two, then stick and not pump again until I jiggled and coaxed it to recycle.  We limped along that way in relays, the two of us, him with the little bottle going pffft, pffft, pffts, and me with the poof, poof… silence of the bigger bottle, until I got the idea of getting a sports bottle with a greater squirting capability.  Ironically, the one Doug found in an upper shelf in the kitchen was one with Smokey the Bear on it.

  
  

  He got it down just in time, for as the upper portion of the stack began to burn itself out and cool, the burning creosote broke free and fell to the baffle.  That was when the water-cooling of the stovepipe became critical.  The cherry-red glow we’d been seeing before that was okay, but when it lit up bright orange and spread, there was danger of the bottom of the stack melting, causing the whole burning business to collapse into the living room.  No thanks.  We redoubled our efforts at spritzing and misting.

  
  

  In the midst of this activity, Doug asked, “You want to get a picture of this for your blog?”  I demurred, saying I was too busy with damage control.  But when the fire had begun to exhaust its fuel and cool, I put down the mister and picked up the camera.  That’s the base of the stovepipe.

  
  

  Soon after I’d gotten up to help Doug with the misting, Greyfox woke and sleepily asked what was up.  He misheard “seal” as “steel” when Doug told him what happened to precipitate the fire, and we had an involved explanation.  Then he just lay there until the emergency was past and I’d taken pictures.  Finally, as Doug was pausing in his misting to take off his hat and one of his sweatshirts, first chance he’d had to do so, Greyfox sat up and said, “Can I help?  I need to piss.”  I said he could help by staying the hell away from my stovepipe.  The house is already redolent of Simple Green cleaner, some residue of which had been in the spray bottle I was using.

  
  

  Doug protested, suggesting that we let Greyfox piss on the stovepipe and take pictures.  Greyfox expressed the thought that blogging that would disqualify me for ZangaZine.  Then he offered to put on his hernia truss first, to which Doug replied that would be “emetic, but not erotic.”  Another episode of our sit-com life.

  
  

  Greyfox got up and checked the thermometer in the corner of the living room.  It was 75°, warmest it has been all winter.  Our misting had raised the humidity in here, too.  Dry air is a perennial winter problem.  I’m truly comfortable in here right now, in all this warm moist air, even if it does reek of chlorophyll.

  
  

  I wonder if there’s any point to going back to bed.  Probably not, wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, unless I get something to eat first.  Eat first….  Then after the fire goes out, I can put the stove back together, shovel the ashes out of the firebox, rekindle the fire… then I have to go to the laundromat and get a shower before I leave for town today.   Later, all.

  • 12:18 pm
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