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Life is too short to eat bad food! Sharing great recipes, farm life, stories and photography from our Northern California dairy farm.

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February 16, 2011

Fire in the Hole

Okay, not exactly, but I have to say that was the first thought that sprang into my mind when I was awoken at midnight.  If you've ever been awakened in the middle of the night and something just doesn't feel right, or in my case, doesn't smell right and if you're like me, you would nudge your husband to wake him up and tell him it smells like smoke.

It's February, it's pouring down rain outside and it smells like a bonfire in our house. 

In our living room, where our wood burning stove is located, we discovered a room full of smoke.
We've been using our wood stove all winter without a problem but for some reason last night, maybe the rain, maybe the high winds, we don't know, something decided to clog our wood stove draft pipe.

Smoke was pouring out from the bottom of the wood stove into our living room.  Luckily I'm a very light sleeper and Dominic and I sleep with our bedroom door open and the kids sleep with their doors closed.  The smell of smoke woke me immediately, as soon as it hit our bedroom.

Long story short.....we removed the two logs from the wood stove, and opened every window and door in our house and began fanning out the smoke. 



Needless to say, I have a lot of ash to clean up.  Here's what our dining room table looked like this morning.  And the ash has settled everywhere.  The smell of smoke is still in our house, Febreeze is just not cutting it.

One more disturbing thing....we have hard wired fire alarms in every room of our house.....not one of them went off.



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10 comments:

Michelle said...

Sounds like it might have been a down draft from the high winds. Our wood stove has done this before. Smelly and messy.

calliecalgal said...

Sounds like you need some smoke alarms in addition to the fire alarms!

Calamity Lace said...

Oh my that is horrible. That exact thing happened to my aunt a few weeks ago...in below freezing temps nonetheless.

Maru Whitmore said...

Wow! I always marvel at how fast things can change! What a blessing that you are a light sleeper, I hope things go back to normal soon. Smoke smell is always tough to eliminate from a room. I hope you find a way to fine tune the alarms for their sensitivity. It's a good thing your drill did only involve the smoke. Our Corn stove has had that happen when birds decide its exhaust of is a good place to roost in the summertime. A screen is now basic and we check it every so often.

Stay safe!

Nancy Grossi ~ Churned In Cali ~ The Wife of a Dairyman said...

@FarmChick, good to hear {in a way} that we're not the only ones this has happened to.

@calliecalgal, I meant to say smoke detectors in every room instead of fire alarms! They are all hard wired, so weird that they didn't go off...

@LaceyJo, well at least our temps are only in the 40's..

@ Maru, yes, within two hours half the house was completely filled with smoke. I'm still smelling it now at 6:15 p.m. Thanks for sharing your story.

Unknown said...

We had a fire alert hard wired and it was burned when lightning struck the house.

Are your detectors, heat or smoke detectors or both?

So glad everyone is okay. At our house it is when we get a storm from the East that we end up with a back draft down the chimney of the wood stove, so we have to put the fire out when the storm is from that direction. Thank goodness it is a very rare occurrence here.

ann said...

If you have insurance there our Companies that specialize in that type of work They do a very good job

Nancy Grossi ~ Churned In Cali ~ The Wife of a Dairyman said...

@fleming4716, we have hard wired smoke detectors and we also have an alarm system with sprinklers. Thanks for sharing your story, maybe the high winds were the cause last night.

@ann, good to know....if this smoke smell doesn't go away soon, we're going to have to do something.

Jessica Johnson said...

How scary and thank goodness you woke up! Maybe you should have carbon monoxide detectors too? Just a thought. Also, I would definitely have your smoke alarms looked at. If I burn toast mine goes off so if your room was filled with smoke, that is really frightening that they didn't go off. I'm glad everyone is safe!

Nancy Grossi ~ Churned In Cali ~ The Wife of a Dairyman said...

@Jessica, I think our smoke detectors are also carbon monoxide but if they don't go off...
Definitely checking them all! Thank you!