We've all but eliminated running our LP furnace with the price of fuel these days. So, we have been starting the wood unit earlier and ending the season later. I think last years final burn was on May 1st... Anyways, this year I decided to start doing my own chimney sweeping. So, after that May 1st burn, I cleaned the furnace and stove pipe and then moved on to the Class A. It went quite well as I really don't have much creosote and the fly ash I have is easy to agitate and remove. Fast forward to this fall. We did our first burn in late Sept. / early Oct. sometime. After lighting the fire, we were doing chores outside and I picked up a really bad smell. All I could think of was that maybe my new poly chimney sweep brush lost a bristle and that was burning/melting in the chimney. The smell was gone in short order and I quickly forgot about it. Last night it was warm (in the 40's) so I figured I'd load lightly so the furnace would go out overnight and then I could do my first heat exchanger / stove pipe cleaning of the season. All went normally until I got to the last horizonal section before the Class A goes vertical. I saw what looked like a pile of ash and tried to vacuum it out but it didn't move. So, I grabbed my heat exchanger cleaning tool and pulled out the "ash." Well, what do you know... it sure wasn't ash. Apparently the smell from a couple months back was me roasting a small bird... I'm not sure how he got past the chimney cap? But there he was...
We had a woodpecker in our fireplace last year - for 3 days we kept hearing this tapping sound and couldn't figure it out. Then I saw it move. Was a bugger getting it out but it was returned to the wild.
