A VERY SCARY MOMENT

Inevitably we turned to Google for the cause behind my mystery health condition and one idea was that it might be an allergy to fumes caused by a wood burning fire.  

This sounded plausible as we had been burning the fires every day for months, often both of them.  This is the first long winter we have spent here with only a short trip back to the UK at Christmas. We had the chimneys for both fires swept recently, the living room one last November and the kitchen one (finally) in February.

So you would think we should be safe, wouldn’t you?

We stopped burning wood in March, heating the house instead with the gas central heating and a motley collection of electric heaters.  Then the other weekend we were having people round to dinner on what had been a damp, grey, cool and miserable spring day so we lit the living room fire.  It was nice to see it going again.  

Everyone congregated in the kitchen as usual and I thought I could smell burning.  I checked the oven but although it was switched on it was empty.  I went to check the fire in the living room and although it looked normal the room was filled with acrid fumes and there was a strong smell of burning metal.

Nick and the other guests piled into the room to investigate.  I flung open the two outside doors to try to let out the smoke and fumes.  The exit pipe on this fire comes out of the back forms an L-shaped bend and then goes up the chimney.  The whole of the lower structure was glowing red hot.

Nick opened the fire door and emptied a fire extinguisher into it, then buckets of water which put the fire out but the pipes were still red hot.

At the bottom of the L-shaped bend there is a small sump which seemed to be the source of the heat.  Nick removed all the wood from the fire to a metal bucket and chucked water as best he could into the fire back.  It stopped glowing and with things a little calmer we were able to relax and have dinner.

Once the guests had gone home we checked the fire and although the stove itself was now cool the pipes at the back were still very not.  Not glowing any more but too hot to touch. Something was still burning in there that we daren't leave and go to bed.

Nick fetched a garden sprayer from the barn and sprayed water into the back of the fire until the pipe was cool enough to handle. You can imagine the mess.  He managed to pull the stove away from the back wall far enough to get at the pipe and wrestle it out of its fixing into the back of the stove.

The sump at the bottom of the pipe had a thick coating of solidified ash and soot and this is what had caught fire.  The really scary part is that the fire had gone from normal to deadly in minutes.  When I think of the number of times we have left the fire, sometimes both of them, burning nicely to keep the house warm while we went out, leaving the dog and cat at home, what might have happened.  The cat could escape through her cat flap but the dog would have been trapped inside.

It seems that this sump is something that should be removed and cleaned out regularly, which we didn’t know.  We don’t think the man did it when he swept the chimney in November either.  Just by having the chimney swept annually doesn’t mean you are completely safe.

We have bought new parts to replace the old pipes but for now both wood burners are "in retirement" while we think about what we should do next winter.  The gas radiator system is a hotch potch of old, inefficient radiators of various vintages that are not all in the best position and are difficult to balance.  This central heating by itself is not sufficient to heat the house during the coldest part of the winter and is expensive to run.  Another option would be to go electric but replacing the existing radiators with electric panel heaters would require rewiring the whole house as there are already too few electric sockets in places where we need them.

The final solution would be to spend the colder months in our UK house which is much smaller and easier to keep warm. We shall see.

As well as the usual tidying up in the kitchen after a dinner party, and the washing up, we spent the next day tackling a huge mess in the living room due to the use of the fire extinguisher and all the water.  This is something I hope never to have to do again.