Pellet Stove fire in Maine

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I full clean my stove every 7-10 days, including opening the fines box and vacuuming it.
I also pull the bottom cap of my outside stack and look up in it with a flashlight..
can't do any more than that but still cautious...
have read here where some only give a good clean once a season..
that would freak me out!!!!
 
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A lot of pictures of trucks and fireman but few of the home on fire. Feed tube backup and hopper fire? News media blowing out of proportion. If a big fire why wasn't there some salvage operation?
 
Tonyray said:
I full clean my stove every 7-10 days, including opening the fines box and vacuuming it.
I also pull the bottom cap of my outside stack and look up in it with a flashlight..
can't do any more than that but still cautious...
have read here where some only give a good clean once a season..
that would freak me out!!!!
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Me too, I barely can stand waiting the week to ten days. If you ever lived through a chimney fire you would know the feeling !! We did, in the very chimney I'm using now with the stainless liner. It's quite something I'll tell you, it started with the controls on the old wood stove rattling, then the doors shaking and it sounded like a train was running by the house up through the chimney. I ran outside and this thick horrendous smoke was billowing out through the woods after it ran along the peak of my roof in the NW wind that day. I ran downstairs and got a garden hose and started washing the shingles down along the sides of the chimney and external part of the fireplace. I had my wife toss a box of baking soda into the stove. A fire fighter friend of mine ( now passed away) said to do those things if I ever had a chimney fire. My chimney is two rows thick to the house. Damage was minimal, no house fire, some popped mortar and a new stainless liner was the result. We had the chimney inspected and re pointed. The year after the chimney fire I switched to coal, that was more than 35 years ago but I remember it like it was yesterday. The experience is hair curling ! Never mind a house fire due to neglect, can you even imagine how you would feel ?

Wind ahead about 37 years,. When I announced I wanted to change out the coal stove for pellets, my wife said as long as it's not another wood stove but she also didn't want a new coal stove due to government regulation fears on coal in the future.. Coal is super safe though. With pellets just burn hot enough to not build creosote and basically you just have ash dust in the pipe that you can brush out with a nylon brush. I'm just about at the one ton mark now, I will be doing just that. Oh and incidentally, we have 5 smoke detectors in the house ( and two in the tenants apartment hard wired to ours), two are co as well.
 
WIth a pellet stove the ash can;t be re-ignited I'm told, so I highly doubt you could have a pellet chimney fire? Correct?
 
THE SKY IS FALLING THE SKY IS FALLING..............
 
Bioburner said:
A lot of pictures of trucks and fireman but few of the home on fire. Feed tube backup and hopper fire? News media blowing out of proportion. If a big fire why wasn't there some salvage operation?
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It was pretty engulfed when they got there. The chief said they may have been able to do more if they got there sooner, but it is all volunteer.
 
This news piece is to vague. I had a fire in a home that the news media got a hold of. I took a firefighter down the basement with a water extinguisher and I took a couple buckets. It was a clothes dryer that the lint trap had caught fire. Couple squirts and took contents of dryer out and put in buckets and wetted and brought out and disassembled the dryer. Lots of smoke, lots of trucks in case it went south.
 
Bioburner said:
This news piece is to vague. I had a fire in a home that the news media got a hold of. I took a firefighter down the basement with a water extinguisher and I took a couple buckets. It was a clothes dryer that the lint trap had caught fire. Couple squirts and took contents of dryer out and put in buckets and wetted and brought out and disassembled the dryer. Lots of smoke, lots of trucks in case it went south.
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What's your point ;?
 
sinnian said:
It was pretty engulfed when they got there. The chief said they may have been able to do more if they got there sooner, but it is all volunteer.
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See if you can get a make and model or possible fire report. Inquiring minds want to know:)
 
hyfire said:
WIth a pellet stove the ash can;t be re-ignited I'm told, so I highly doubt you could have a pellet chimney fire? Correct?
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The ash won't burn . You don't want to have excessive creosote, that builds from burning too cool ( real low stack temp) but even at that with pellet stoves it mostly is a watery black drip or stain more than built up hard creosote like from a wood stove that runs all choked up. No, more likely it was something else in this case. Do a good install, keep it cleaned regularly. Pellet stoves overall are safer than solid wood burning stoves but lets face it, they have fire in them, use common sense and inspect things now and then. Maintain your smoke/co detectors.
 
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Another pellet stove goes wild story with very little useful information. It appears there were no deaths or serious injuries thankfully.
 
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Bioburner said:
A lot of pictures of trucks and fireman but few of the home on fire. Feed tube backup and hopper fire? News media blowing out of proportion. If a big fire why wasn't there some salvage operation?
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Knowing the challenges of keeping up volunteer fire fighting response capability, the Chief of this service was quite up-front with the media about the lack of first-in response units (only 3 people on the first-due fire truck), significantly hampering their ability to do much to knock the fire down when it was still in the pellet stove.

You can't get much 'wet stuff on the hot stuff' with only 3 first - in fire fighters. By the time rural depts can get mutual aid from nearby towns to show up at a fire scene to help them, they're pretty much resolved to 'saving the foundation', as they say.

Our Tea Party govna' has been inclined to cost shift state budget deficits back down to the towns, so taxpayers are pushing back on any local tax subsidies needed to support expenses like emergency services, (until they're the one dialing 911 of course).

Politics aside, our local Fire Chief is a Fire Marshal for the state - I'll try to find out if he knows more about what initiated the pellet stove fire.
 
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DMKNLD said:
Knowing the challenges of keeping up volunteer fire fighting response capability, the Chief of this service was quite up-front with the media about the lack of first-in response units (only 3 people on the first-due fire truck), significantly hampering their ability to do much to knock the fire down when it was still in the pellet stove.

You can't get much 'wet stuff on the hot stuff' with only 3 first - in fire fighters. By the time rural depts can get mutual aid from nearby towns to show up at a fire scene to help them, they're pretty much resolved to 'saving the foundation', as they say.

Our Tea Party govna' has been inclined to cost shift state budget deficits back down to the towns, who are pushing back on any local tax subsidies needed to support expenses like emergency services, (until they're the one dialing 911 of course).

Politics aside, our local Fire Chief is a Fire Marshal for the state - I'll try to find out if he knows more about what initiated the pellet stove fire.
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Responding to any fire in winter is major under taking. Water resources in country are next to none and need major consideration before commitment of fire crews.
Marshall may not be able to provide anymore info because of possible Insurance litigation.
 
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The enviro ef3 that I bought used had it's first chimney fire after 1 month then another one at 1 am dog barking and alarm going crazy.Black smoke every wear . Had to air out the house and it was cold that night.All I can say is it's a scary thing.made my mind to get rid of that junk and knock on wood loving my harman.
 
This story does not give much detail but if I had to guess I'd suspect something along the lines of inadequate installation/maintenance/cleaning. I remember a story in the news a few years back about about a house burning down because someone had thrown a blanket on a space heater while it was running and another story of a house burning down because the owners were storing all kinds of flammable products about 3-4 feet away from their basement boiler.

Of course we always feel for the people that these things happen to but sometimes the reason behind them happeneing is simple carelessness.
 
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I have heard of few folks who have built high end camps in rural Maine towns that have been required by their insurance company to install sprinklers. Basically in many of these towns about all the local volunteer fire department can do is protect the chimney and foundation from burning down as the reality is that the house is long gone before they can make it to the scene. I am not being critical, its just with a small town with possibly only a few able body folks around at a given time and icy rural roads they can only respond so fast.
 
hyfire said:
WIth a pellet stove the ash can;t be re-ignited I'm told, so I highly doubt you could have a pellet chimney fire? Correct?
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Ash is defined as inorganic and a non combustible byproduct of burning.

Now that all aside what is produced by a poorly burning stove isn't actually a true ash and can indeed be restarted given the proper conditions.

As to chimney fires ANY (note the word) fire that produces volatile organic byproducts that do not maintain exhaust temperatures above their condensation point (complex mixtures of such things exist in ALL wood based combustion) can have a chimney fire.

One of the reasons to fully line a masonry chimney instead of doing a vent into dump of a pellet stove is to maintain the exhaust temperatures above the condensation point of the nasties in the exhaust gases (So about those questions of should I line the chimney to the top with pellet vent, any questions now).
 
Now about the fire in Hollis.

There is insufficient information in all of the reports I've seen or read to nail down exactly what caused the fire.
 
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