A few weeks ago I was in the kitchen and I heard a fire alarm coming from the seller. Sometimes a little bit of cooking will cause enough of the aroma to come out of cooking and go up to the second floor where it sounds as though something should be checked, but when I heard something in the cellar I knew that it was not what I was doing. I also knew that the alarm was not making an occasional warning to tell me that the batteries needed to be replaced, because I do in fact replace the new batteries in every fire alarm everyday without fail on January 1st.
That said, I quickly open the door to the cellar after first feeling of the temperature of the door, and I heard the alarm going off. As I started walking down the doorway I noticed that there was a fire burning around the furnace coming out of the furnace and flashing Flames up around the large wooden supports at the top of the seller. I immediately went to the thermostat and turned off the power, and then grabbed a small fire extinguisher and went back downstairs. Happily, the wood had not gone hot enough to start burning the wood, and I was happy because I was unable to get quickly close to it because there were a lot of parts of the Furnace that were still quite hot. I watched it until it appeared to be down to normal room temperature, and then for another half hour.
I called my local plumber, and within an hour the plumber was to my house inspecting the problems. After looking at it carefully he determined that in his opinion there was too much damage to consider turning it on to see whether it was doing something repairable.
I next had to call my insurance company and they quickly sent someone to make notes of the damage and causes. While I was waiting for that to be done I ran electric heaters everywhere in the house, and luckily it was not too cold and the house stayed warm enough to avoid freezing. While I was waiting my plumber had found another furnace where a new one could be quickly gotten of the very large size required for my house, and had it coming on the way.
The short ending is that the old one was removed, the new one was put in, and 4 days after the problem I was back in business with the system keeping warm with a new furnace. The amazing thing is that back in about 1969 I had a fire where I was living in a different but nearby house. Because I was not home there was a tremendous amount of damage and the cost of insurance only covered the materials, it took my wife and I 13 months to make the house whole again. Needless to say I have a current house which is more properly insured and after the first fire my wife became an insurance company and broker.
I'm convinced that if I had been close enough to hear the fire alarm, but couldn't quickly come all the way down from the thirds Floor 2 find out what the problem was and turn it off, I might have had damage of huge proportions again in the house the interesting thing is that both my original House and my current house were both 1885 Construction.
