I know there are alot of us on the forum that burn wood and I was wondering if you have ever had a chimney fire,were you home?what did you do?Any close calls??How often do you clean your chimney and are you real fussy about what you burn.We operate two stoves all winter,one cookstove and one regular woodburner.We try to clean em out every two months or when we hear the creosote falling.We burn slab wood in the day and cordwood at night.Thanx.....just wonderin.....teri

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2002

Answers

teri, yes I had a chimney fire many years ago. We had triple thickness stainless that went up from a fire place in the middle of a dome. I was home alone with my three children and three of my neighbor's children, 1/4 mile off the road and no phone. It went off like a rocket roaring, blew a hole in the side up at the top and sprayed sparks all over the dome(ourside). Never been so scared in my life. Got all the children out of the house and into the car (that didn't run) and just waited to see if the whole place was going to go up in flames. Luck would have it that it started to rain and extingished all the sparks on the roof.

We have the chimney cleaning equipment and clean our once a month. I mark it on the calendar and am VERY picky about it. We burn mostly cord wood cause we have so much dead fall in our woods.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2002

Since we started heating with wood 25 yrs. ago, we've had two different woodstoves. The first was a Scandinavian airtight that was very economical! We used it for ten yrs. while we lived in our 24x40 capped cellar and usually burned about 4 cord of wood each year. The stovepipe for that stove had a very short distance to travel up through the roof and many times we'd get a roaring chimney fire going. But it was so easy to go outside, jump up on the roof and pour a box of baking soda down the pipe. Now that we've built the house on top, we have a wood cookstove as our only source of heat for this two-story log home. We've doubled the amount of firewod we burn, but amazingly, we have never had a chimney fire with this stove. And this stove was built in 1920!! Maybe this stove loses too much heat up the chimney and keeps the creosote to a minimum...who knows!! But we have the stovepipe set up so we can take it apart inside the house and run a wire pipe cleaning brush all the way up to the pipe cap. We do this every two weeks when we're running the stove hard (January and February). We burn only dry hardwood... mostly ash, oak and maple. Cedar is used for kindling. I love my cookstove and use it as much as possible during the winter. I sure wish I was better at judging the oven temp, though, when I'm baking bread, etc.!!

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2002

The advice from our chimney cleaning guy is that once a day you need to let the stove burn really really hot . The theory is that daily you have a little chimney fire, it burns out the creosote from the day before, and voila you have very little creosote in your chimney to catch fire and cause damage and death. We get our chimney cleaned by him once a year..sometimes only every second year if we forget and since we follow his advice he has had nothing but high praise for the condition of our chimney buildup. Its a straight chimney right up through the house (one and a half storey farm house)so there are no bends etc to bugger up the process.

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2002

I second what Alison said. The little chimney fires that we have every day prevent the big ones. We finally got our homestead put together and installed a woodstove last week. God ! I missed wood heat, nothing like it. I sell, install and troubleshoot wood stoves and invariably, I find that the problems most people experience with a new stove is usually related to how they operate it. Old stoves usually leaked so bad that there was never a lack of air so the fire would never be dampered down so far as to get things clogged up. Newer stoves do a great job when they are kept up to a reasonable temperature but when they are dampered down for that overnight burn they produce great amounts of tars and creosote. The next morning, once we get the fire up and going we 'let er rip ' and get the stove temp up to 650 or higher. This not only crystalizes the crud in the flue, on our stove it burns the creosote off the glass and saves us the trouble. I think a stove thermometer is a great idea. While it is important, what kind of wood, how dry, type of stove, chimney configuration,etc, I think how the stove is operated is by far the most important. The following is a quote from metalbestos installation manual. (They make stainless steel flue pipe) Air tight or controlled draft wood stoves and heaters produce dense smoke if they are loaded for long duration or overnight fires, and can rapidly produde heavy,thick creosote deosits. It ias possible, by having a short duration daily fire, to burn off these doposits or prevent them from building up to dangerous levels." Stay warm jz

-- Anonymous, February 12, 2002

yippy, skippy............jz is back!!!!!!!!!!!!! :>) Missed you.

-- Anonymous, February 12, 2002

Hey Diane. Nice to see ya. Whaaaaaaaaaaaas happenin ?

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2002