The Price of a Good Education
Today, class, we need to address the dangers of creosote buildup in your chimney. One way to prevent this dangerous condition is to leave the stove door ajar when you first build your fire in the morning, get up a good flame and burn out the creosote in the stack you created by damping down. You can hear it tinkling down as the flames eat up what collected on the pipes. The trick, of course, is not to catch it on fire, sending flames up into the chimney at ferocious temperatures. Otherwise you risk a chimney fire.
As kids, me and my brother caught an old stone fireplace chimney on fire burning Christmas wrappings. My father was a U.S. Forest Service ranger and we were encamped in an historic ranger station at what is now the ‘Birthplace of the Forest Service’ near Asheville, North Carolina in the Pisgah National Forest. I was maybe 5 years old and my brother was 3. I still remember the old man outside watching flames erupt from the top of the chimney sending sparks onto the roof which he worried,rightly, might catch fire. It didn’t, the house survived and we were given our first lessons in woodburning safety.
Forty or more years later I would recall my father’s angry admonitions. A little belatedly. We caught the chimney of the shack on fire one snowy day by leaving the door open too long. We heard it before we saw it, an infernal rushing of gas and flame from the stove up the stack and into the chimney. I closed the door and shut down the damper to keep it from feeding on oxygen, but it was too late, the stack was on fire and that obsidian-like creosote was now burning. I climbed the roof in the snow, slipping a few times and sledding down to the lower roof over the bathroom, but I finally made the summit, no little feat, where I could look down the guts of the chimney. It looked like the hellish mouth of some masonry dragon, red and glowing. I considered dumping snow down its gullet but I worried that would crack the brickwork. Maybe, I thought optimistically, it would clean that creosote out once and for all. Just keep an eye on it, make sure nothing came through any cracks in the masonry to catch a floor on fire, might just be a good thing after all.
The mizzus, of course, wanted to call the VFD. Naturally I pooh-poohed that. Calling the Volunteer Fire Department is like asking for directions when you’re lost. The worst was over, the sparks weren’t sailing out the chimney any more. Things were under control. An hour later I put my hand on the chimney in the upstairs bedroom. It was hot. Half an hour later it was hotter. I got buckets ready, just in case. Half an hour more and I couldn’t touch the bricks and the floor was smoking. I tossed some water on it and steam hissed up immediately. Now I was worried. For the next two hours I spritzed the floor and the ceiling to keep them from catching fire. The heat from the glowing creosote was incredible passing through the bricks. All that energy stored up from thousands of fires, just waiting for its chance.
I got to tell you it was a long night. But … we didn’t lose the shack. Course we could never trust the mortar in that chimney after that. Any crack between the floors might let a flame through we’d never see until too late. So shortly after, I deconstructed the chimney brick by brick. But those were clean bricks, I can testify to that. Not a speck of creosote on those beauties. The stovepipe we replaced the chimney with, well, it never compared with that old chimney. I am glad, I have to say, I learned my lesson on the sauna about clearances to the roof. Otherwise I would’ve probably burned the house down learning it. Education comes with a pricetag.
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