Sitting here with nothing but time on my hands and was reading the posts about the law suits and the smoke and all that and how some one could find alternative ways to heat their home other than wood. I make it a habit to watch my local news at least once if not twice a day. When they have a news flash about home fires in my local I always perk up to see what was the cause. Here in my neck of the woods there always seems to be a lot of home and business fires this time of year. I hate to hear of any one losing lives or belongings due to a fire but what I find even more interesting is the cause of most fires in my area. Almost all are electrical related, space heaters, or in the case of a small business just yesterday, a freaking candle. There are a lot of good old boys burning wet wood and never cleaning nothing around me that have been doing it that way for years just like their Grandpa did before them. That's not saying they aint going to have a fire, as a matter of fact, I know several good ole boys that intentionally have a chimney fire once a year to clean the flue out. It aint for me that's how some of us around here do it. I would rather have my wood stove over firering than have a scented candle burning any where in my hooch.
I work in the city sometimes and have to go on fire calls. It's ama zing how many more fires there are this time of year because of the reasons you mentioned.
Improper installation, and keeping things too close to the heating device are also causes, but house fires with wood stoves that catch fire usually are related to some chimney fire from dirty burning. Improper ash disposal seems to be next in line.
There was a rural home a few miles from here that just burned to the ground due to hot stove ashes. Apparently the homeowner emptied his ashes into a box on the porch before he went to work. The box later caught fire while he was away and the home was lost.
Ashes are nothing to play around with. The example above is not the first or the last. A major fire happened near me a couple of years ago when someone dumped ashes out in the snow and assumed they were out.
Good friend of mine is an insurance agent with 30 years under his belt. He once told me that candles are one of, if not the largest causes of home fires. People forget they have one lit or fall asleep with them going...
Speaking of ash fires last year being new to burning wood and all I put ashes in steel 5gallon buckets let one sit for 2days and emptied it into the dumpster containing remodeling debris,for good measure I dumped probably 10gallons of water on top of it abd went to bed. 2am it looked like our whole front yard was on fire when I woke up blurry eyed! Took fifteen minutes with the garden hose that barely reached. Thank goodness I pushed it 10feet further from the house earlier that day I may not be here telling you that if I hadn't! Lesson learned now. I wait at least two weeks now
Just saw on the local news about a week ago that a family had a house fire from a heat lamp. About a hundred thousand dollars worth of damange.
1st year I burned I put my ashes in a steel 55 gallon barrel. One time I dumped and then left for a few days. Came back and started back burning. A week to the day I needed to empty out and when I got out to the barrel it was still warm enough that water was on the lid from the snow that had fallen over the last week. It was a real eye opener on how long ash can stay hot.
Ashes caused this tragic one in our state where several people including a few young girls died. http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-ap-stamford-fire-settlement-20150113-story.html -This one breaks my heart. (This article is the update focusing on the lawsuit side, but apparently the ashes were originally emptied by the grandfather so they could pretend Santa came). Nothing to fool around with.
BTW: I dispose of my ashes in a small metal garbage pail and leave it OUTSIDE the house on a concrete slab where it sits for a week. Since I heard that story a couple years ago I got a little more paranoid and started adding some water or snow to the pail just in case. (Doing this also makes less dust in the air when I dispose of it).
I dispose of hot ashes by carrying them in 2 - 5 gallon steel pails out onto the tailgate of my truck . Bring them out to a commercial 3 yard dumpster that I have about 550 feet from my house and dump them in it. I only use the dumpster to burn off scrap from firewood splitting and cutting. I am also lucky enough to have wet lands on 3 sides of my property. There is nothing worse than hot ashes, I know a couple that cleaned their wood stove and placed the steel pail along side of the house in the morning and left for work only to come home and find the vinyl siding melted above the pail. Can't be too careful.
I put my ashes in a covered galvanized bucket in my house. The bucket has a lid, and it sits on the tile for wood stove. As I am sure most do, I try only to remove ashes when my fire is completely out. Even with doing that, you'll often find warm embers buried in the ashes. Putting them in the closed buckets works for me. I then dump the full bucket into my grass clipping pile. As for home fires, with 15 years on our local volunteer fire department, only twice can I recall house fires as a result of a chimney fire. In both cases, there was a problem with the flu that allowed the fire from the chimney fire to escape into the walls of the house.
