On Sat. evening our wood stove started spewing smoke all through the house. We were struggling to fix it until after midnight - finally had to remove the burning logs and throw them out on the lawn (at least our present 2 feet of snow keeps disposal of burning logs from being a problem - no fire danger there.)
We went to bed with no heater on, as our wood stove is our only source of heat. Sunday the temperatures dropped bellow zero. On Monday morning it was 29 below zero when I got up to feed. And we haven't had a working wood stove in two days.
Dave put in a heroic effort on Sunday and Monday keeping the house from dropping bellow freezing by keeping our fire place lit (a fire place does not heat a house, really, that job is left to a wood stove. But we did manage to use it to keep the temperatures around 50, so our pipes wouldn't freeze.) We were up at 5am this morning, trying more things to fix this problem, but just couldn't figure out what was wrong. Finally called every chimney sweep company in Missoula but no-one would come up and work on our chimney in -30 degree weather. We were about to go buy a chimney cleaning pole and have me climb up on the roof myself to see if I could see anything that might have fallen in there and was blocking the air flow, when one of the chimney sweeps called back. He said he thought he couldn't just leave us with no heat, so he would come right up. He was great.
Turns out to be a really good thing he came - the stove pipe had been nocked out of kilter and we never could have fixed it (or even diagnosed it) ourselves. He tromped right up on our roof (through a good foot build-up of snow) and got the thing fixed. We now have a fire roaring in the wood-stove and the temp in here just broke 70. Its heaven!
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