Wood Heat!

We heat our home almost exclusively with wood heat. We have baseboard heaters in a few rooms that we turn on occassionaly and we also have a propane heater on our wall in the living room. We have not used it much this year because we need more propane.

I have never really minded wood heat. I mean its so much cheaper than running electric heat and the heat seems to be warmer. But it is a lot of work. You have to cut and haul wood, split it, carry it inside and then get a fire started (I have trouble with this) and then maintain it so it doesn't go out. Even though it is a lot of work I've always kind of enjoyed it.

That is until the past few days. This whole winter we have noticed that it hasn't been drawing as good as it used too. We really didn't think anything about it until this week. Everytime we tried to build a fire it wouldn't burn and smoke would come into the house everytime we opened the door. Travis took the pipe off and there was some creosote build up in there so we removed it and cleaned the trap from the chimney outside. It still didn't work. I told him maybe something was blocking in the chimney, he seemed to think the weather had a lot to do with it, because it had been really rainy and windy. Well today we tried building a fire and it started smoking even more. I went to town for a little bit and when I came back Travis said it had smoke rolling out of the whole thing. Our house was so smokey. So he went on the roof and had a long pole that he ran down in the chimney and discovered the problem. A tree limb had feel into the chimney and then creosote build up around it causing a blockage in the chimney. This is why it wasn't drawing and smoke was entering the house. He was able to knock it all down and remove it from the trap on the chimney.

We are so thankful that we didn't have a flu fire. I know we could have very easily had one. Now we are going to make sure the chimney is clean every year before fire season. By the way I don't mind the wood heat again, until I have to build a fire again.