Ground Fog, Yeah…Right

 

It was a bit chilly during the night; temperature this morning was 38 degrees.  It was time to light a fire and warm things up as I prepared a small stack of wood in the wood burning stove.  There’s a trick to getting things going, something I’ve yet to master.

The fellow who installed the wood burning stove, Ron Weathers, showed us how to prepare a loosely balled piece of newspaper inside kindling wood and top that off with a piece of newspaper so that the flash of heat will start air flowing upwards into the flue. He reminded me to leave the door to the stove open a bit to permit air to enter the combustion chamber and let the firewood catch properly.

Let’s just say that this morning’s attempts at lighting a fire didn’t go smoothly.  For some reason the paper didn’t catch, at least not entirely.  It put itself out, mostly.  The combustion chamber filled with smoke and began seeping out into the living room.  Opening the door to the stove, an attempt to ignite the partially burned paper, proved to be a mistake.  A ball of smoke rolled into the living room.

I hurriedly opened one of the living room windows, turned on a fan hoping to push the smoke out through the window.  I then grabbed another fan from my office and opened the window enough, so the edges of the window acted like a vice to hold the fan against the screen, sucking a stream of smoke out the window.  It was working so I turned on other fans, directing air flow to the open window. After a few minutes, maybe half an hour or so, most of the smoke had been pushed out the window.

I then went about getting the fire properly lit, another cloud of smoke escaped; but this time a river of air had been established so the smoke exited the house without filling the living room. Thankfully the wood actually caught fire and created a proper draft which went up the flue as it was supposed to.

After things returned to mostly normal, and looking out the window prior to removing the fan and closing the window; I’ve lost my train of thought, I looked out the window and noticed a blanket of ground fog on my neighbor’s field.  I say it was ground fog; perhaps it was smoke from my earlier attempts to start a simple wood-burning stove.