re: #84 teleskiguy

I had a chimney fire at a house I lived in outside of Gunnison, CO. Turns out the damn chimney hadn’t been cleaned in years, the creosote was a couple of inches thick. Fortunately we caught it in time, we had the fire out before the fire department showed up (the house was several miles from town, if we had waited for the fire department to come and put the fire out, it would have been a lot worse, took them 20 minutes to get to the house!). They doused it again anyways and flooded the living room. Our landlords put us up in a hotel for three days to clean up and clean the damn chimney. That was some scary shit!

The same with them. It was an older house, and apparently the chimney hadn’t been cleaned in years.

That’s why chimneysweeps were an important profession back in the days of wood heating. Cleaning the flue was a necessary preventive chore. Unfortunately, the need for doing it has been forgotten by many modern users of wood heat. Not insurance companies, though. If they know you’re heating with wood, some will raise your premiums because of the added risk of fire loss.