Let there be heat

Yesterday our wood stove conked out. It filled the house with smoke instead of sending it up the chimney. Smoke was even oozing (can smoke ooze?) out of every little crack and crevice in the stove. It wasn't heating, and we were quickly reduced to opening doors and windows to vent the place. Did I mention it got down to negative 30 degrees up here last night? Ole' Murphy was prosecuting us to the full extent of his law, I can tell you that.

We got a roaring fire going in the fireplace, which helped. Our fireplace has a blower built in so that once the firebox gets heated, warm air can be circulated. It was really nice within about 5' of the fireplace, and the rest of the house stayed just above 50 degrees. We figured it was also a great time to run the self clean cycle on our oven (500 degrees for three hours or so).

Once we had a little heat in the place we tried to tackle the stove. It just started smoking really bad, do we have a green log in there? We took all the burning wood out of it and threw it in the snow outside. Nope, smoke still coming into the house. There's a lot of ash in there, maybe it would breathe better if we cleaned it out. I dug a trench in a snow bank and took 8 big buckets-full of ash out. Nope, still too smoky. Ah, there is a door for removing the ash that falls down the chimney. Took another bucket of ash from there. Nope, still smoky. Well, let's sleep on it, thank goodness for down comforters.

At 5AM this morning, we were awake and decided to try using the shop vac to clean out the horizontal portion of the chimney that goes out the back of the stove. (To do this, I had to get the generator to start in -30 degrees and then find the shop vac out in the garage. Brrrr!!!!) There was about an inch of ash there, but removing it didn't fix anything. However, while shining a light around in there, I saw that there was no opening in the back for the smoke to go up. I got a pole and tested this and confirmed that there seemed to be a blockage.

At 8:01AM we started calling chimney sweeps. It must be the off season for them because of the 4 in the phone book, two were out of town. One was too far away and didn't want to drive all the way up here, but the 4th guy was willing. He got here as the sun came out blazing brightly in complete defiance of the temperature. He agreed that there appeared to be a blockage and hopped up onto the roof with his brushes and poles. There was quite a bit of accumulated ash and creosote in the chimney, so it needed cleaning, for sure. However, at a certain point, his brush got stuck. He hit something metal. A glance inside the wood stove revealed he was banging on the horizontal pipe from above. He figured out that the horizontal pipe had somehow gotten pushed back into the chimney too far and had become closed off by the back wall of the chimney. It is a good thing he was a small man, for he was able to climb halfway into our stove and get a vicegrip clamped onto the pipe. He pulled it out a ways and lit a piece of paper. The smoke went up!!!

Now we have a very clean wood stove and chimney and a nice warm fire going. We stole the big coals out of the fireplace to jump-start the wood stove and now it is warming up in here. My nose is still cold, but there is no longer any frost on my window. We were able to settle out of court with Murphy for about $150, which could have been much worse.