Chimney Sweeps are Cleaning up!

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

If the homeowner is lucky, the resulting roaring blaze will merely burn the chimney clean while filling the house with the fire's loud and extremely unnerving howls. If he's not so lucky, the unwanted fire will cremate the flue's lining and dangerously weaken the chimney. And if he's downright unfortunate, the flames will take out the whole chimney ... and the rest of the house along with it.

All in all there were over 40,000 chimney fires in the United States last year and, according to the National Fire Protection Association, those fires caused more than $23 million worth of damage. That's a loss of $23 million which could have been prevented if every owner of a coal- or wood-burning fireplace, furnace, or stove had only understood the importance of keeping the unit's chimney clean.

THE PLOT THICKENS

There was, of course, a time--back when nearly everyone on this continent heated his or her home with either a wood- or a coal-burner--that virtually everyone in North America was well aware of the havoc a chimney fire could wreak. Or, to put it another way, great grandpa and great grandma most certainly knew the value of keeping their chimneys clean ... if they hadn't suffered one or more unexpected blazes themselves, they'd probably seen several neighbors and/or relatives burned out of house and home on a frigid winter's night.

But then history took a strange double-twist. First-beginning right after World War II--the United States and Canada made almost a complete switch in the way the two nations heated their homes. Within just 25 to 30 years, nearly the entire population of this continent dropped "dirty, trouble some" coal and wood ... in favor of "clean, convenient" natural gas, oil, and electricity. And second -- just when the major portion of North America's old coal- and wood-burning expertise had been forgotten -- the "energy crisis" of the 70's suddenly forced a whole new generation, by the millions, to burn wood and coal once again.

Thanks to this quirk in our recent history, we now are surrounded by what must already be tens of millions of people who are at least supplementally heating their homes with solid fuel for the first time. And they are destined to be joined by further tens of millions of first-time coal and wood users in the years ahead. And a heck of a percentage of all those folks [a] have absolutely no inkling of the time bombs that already are building up -- and will continue to build up -- in their chimneys and [b] have no immediate past generation with the proper firsthand experience to warn them about the ravages of flue fires.

WHICH OPENS UP ONE HECK OF AN OPPORTUNITY ...

We can draw at least three conclusions from this short history lesson:

[1] Since it now seems obvious that the "convenient" ways of heating a house -- with natural gas, oil, and electricity -- are going to continue getting more and more expensive as time goes on ... it seems just as obvious that more and more families in the United States will continue making the switch back to heating with coal and wood in the years to come.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print