Christmas, 2017, my boss gave me a Galileo thermometer. I’d always wanted one, and Mrs. L.A. liked them too.
So it’s the end of January. Time to take down the Christmas stuff and put the pictures back up. Mrs. L.A. was trying to hang a picture on the rock chimney (there’s a nail up there), and she knocked the thermometer off of the narrow brick mantel. It shattered on the wood stove insert.
The hell of it is, after her second attempt I thought I might hang the picture for her so that she wouldn’t knock the thermometer down. But I didn’t. :smack:
I knocked one over when setting up the surround sound for my gaming system. Thing is, I had moved the thermometer from its perch atop the hutch in an attempt to keep that from happening!
I now have a bigger thermometer atop the hutch; the old one didn’t have a large enough temperature range.
Now the whole place smells like kerosene. I tried to clean the stove insert off with some 409 and paper towels. I used a blowtorch to see if anything ignited. I guess there were some spider webs in the grate where the fan rheostat is, as I could hear them crackling. More worrying is that the cement underneath had a flame. I sprayed some more 409 in there and left it. No fires for a while, I guess. (And it’s supposed to be below 40ºF tonight.)
After my initial cleanup, a couple of days later I got out the blowtorch and played it over the affected areas. No flare-ups or fires, so I hoped that any volatiles were gone. Yesterday it was bloody cold, in the 20s. I went ahead and started a fire in the wood stove insert. I am happy to say the house didn’t burn down.
