Quote:
Originally Posted by wdfifteen
I was cleaning the wood stove this morning and MrsWD wanted to help. The stove was dead cold. I went out with a pail of ashes and came back to see - to my horror - that she was cleaning it out with the vacuum cleaner.
Back in the early 70s I was in college, working at a place that sold wood stoves, chain saws, etc.
With the gasoline crisis and the spike in natural gas prices every yahoo in the county was buying chain saws and wood stoves. It was like turning 12 year olds loose with Uzis. I won't go into the stupid chain saw tricks I saw, but a guy i really liked cleaned his "cold" stove with a vacuum cleaner and then put it away in the closet. Burned his house down.
Ever since, i have treated dead cold fires like unloaded guns - they tend to kill people.
I made her let me keep the vacuum outside over night.
She thinks I'm nuts ( so we're even).
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I agree with Zeke. Logical. At our last house we had a fireplace. It had a handy metal door outside in the back yard that accessed the backside of the fireplace. It was easy to empty the ashes outside and avoid the dust cloud inside.
One of the times I emptied the "cold" ashes into a 5 gallon plastic bucket to throw into the trash later. I set the bucket on the concrete patio corner to deal with later. When I came out later to deal with it, the side of the bucket was melted and burning. I bought a metal ash can the next day. My only damage was to an old 5 gallon bucket, but I learned a lesson.