Bart tries to burn down his house

Hey, this is post # 600! Yaaaay.

Fall is in the air. The air is crisp, the leaves are turning, and Bart tries to burn down his house.

When Mrs. Bart and I got back from Thanksgiving, we figured out that something was off with the heating. Specifically, the motor that powers the fan that pushes the hot air out of the furnace wasn't working. We got someone out to replace the motor on Friday, but the replacement didn't have sufficient awesomeness, so we were told we'd have to wait until Monday to get it fixed.

It was a moderate pain, but not a huge one. After all, we have a gas fireplace in the living room. And we were able to borrow a space heater from a friend to keep the bedroom warm at night. Between those two devices, we got the house up to a decent temperature in pretty short order.

(So there's your two burning-down-the-house suspects; where are you going to place your wager?)

Fast forward to Saturday evening. It was getting dark, and time to warm the house up again. Fireplace is going, space heater is going... then I heard the upstairs smoke detector go off. It can be a little fidgety, so I waved a towel under it to make it stop beeping. It promptly resumed beeping.

I smelled smoke.

I smelled in the other upstairs room to see if something was on fire there; no smell. I ran downstairs to check on the space heater... no, that's not burning down anything. Crap, that just leaves the fireplace. But I wasn't doing anything that I hadn't done earlier that day or the previous night. What the hell?

Mrs. Bart suggested it was time to call the fire department - what if something in the chimney had caught fire? We didn't want it getting all... burny... or at least any more burny than it currently was. So we turned off the fireplace, and Mrs. Bart called the fire department. She asked me what the non-emergency number was; I couldn't find it, so she called 911 but explained that this wasn't an emergency per se. We just wanted to make sure our house wasn't on fire.

Not long afterwards, I heard sirens. Great.

Despite realizing the necessity of bringing in the fire fighters, I was reluctant to do so for a couple of reasons. The first was having all the neighbors know the fire department came over. Not that we're particularly close to our neighbors, but still. And the sirens weren't helping me keep my trademark low profile.

Second, as far as I know, fire fighters have two weapons in their arsenal: axes and water. If they do find something on fire, they're going to axe open the wall and pour water on it until it's out. That's not the kind of mess you clean up in five minutes - more like five months. So I figured that, whatever the outcome of this visit, it wasn't going to be good.

Our neighborhood is quiet enough that when an enormous diesel-powered truck pulls onto your street, you can hear it. At least they had turned off the sirens. The flashers were on, though. Remembering that our house number isn't the easiest to see from the road, I stepped outside and waved the truck down. Two fire fighters in full gear, but thankfully sans axes, hopped out, along with a paramedic. In case we had smoke inhalation, I guess.

One fire fighter had an instrument with a screen in his hand. A-ha! Just what I wanted to see - the magic infrared find-fire-in-a-wall scanner. Mrs. Bart was explaining the problem, but I was looking over the guy's shoulder looking for heat signatures. Nothing looked particularly heated, so I thought that was a good sign.

The lead fire fighter said it was time to check out the fire place. He knelt down and took a look.

"So, did you open the flue?"

"Yeah, we flipped that little lever over on the side."

"This one?" He indicated the little lever over on the side.

"Yep. Made sure to flip it to open."

"Yeah... that's not the flue. This," and he reached into the chimney and released the flue and its very obvious long sliding handle, "is the flue."

Oh no. We had been running the fireplace with the flue closed. It's a good thing we didn't die of carbon monoxide poisoning, much less burn down the house. The little lever thing was the outside air control (but with a name like that, can you really blame me for thinking that was the flue?). We hadn't used the fireplace in several years, and it appears that we forgot how to use it.

We aren't people who call 911 to figure out where to vote! We don't try to drown the devil out of autistic children! We both have advanced degrees from accredited universities! And yet we don't know how to identify when a fireplace flue is open.

The fire fighters did a few flue-drawing-the-smoke-out tests with matches, told us to play safe and keep our noses clean and try not to burn down our neighborhood, and took off.

Shockingly, when you run the fireplace properly (flue open and all), it's much less efficient at heating up the house. You don't get those 8-degree swings in temperature within an hour. Instead there's a little warm halo around the fire. I guess that's a decent alternative to burning the house down.

Fortunately the central heat is out up and running, so we're safe for now.

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