Fall fire fears

Turning on the heater for the first time of the year scares me to death.

 

There is actually a somewhat direct reason for this, going back to my sophomore year of college. (Longish story warning)

Freshman year I had lived on the 9th floor of a dorm, and as heat rises, I don’t think we turned on our heater at all during the winter. But sophomore year, I was in a much smaller room on the first floor of a much smaller dorm.

This room wasn’t frequently used, as it ended up being between the building office and the building managers apartment, and opened directly into the building lounge. It also was the first window from the locked door, so got people knocking on it trying to get into the building who didn’t live there.

So, it basically only got used when things were really full, and that year they were. Apparently, the previous few years it hadn’t been… and it was really dusty.

After I’d had the room for about a month or two, the weather got cold. So I turned on the heater.

And all of that dust and build up from a few years sitting all got kicked up, and burnt up.

 

I didn’t realize it yet, but my room had a smoke detector. One of those really loud industrial types. 

I discovered it pretty quickly with a near heart attack to go with the discovery.

Fortunately, it wasn’t connected to set off the ones in the rest of the building, but I didn’t realize that. I’d been woken up by way too many tromps down then back up 9 flights of stairs in the middle of the night by false alarms in my previous dorm, and waited way too long in the cold in just jammies for firemen to arrive and clear the floor that had triggered it.

The office was closed. The manager was away. Nobody was in the lounge, or anywhere I could see them on the first floor at all.

So… what do I do?

 

I ran down to the bathroom, turned on one of the showers, and stood in the little changing area outside of it to pretend I didn’t know what was going on and hadn’t been in my room.

Yes, really really logical. As if the fact I was fully dressed with no towel or soap in sight wouldn’t have been a clue?

I suppose in the long run it was probably better than calling the fire department or something else rash.. but standing there shaking with my heart racing in full panic mode was definitely not one of my most helpful solutions to a problem.

Eventually I calmed down enough to realize that I couldn’t hear it anymore. And a full ten minutes later was brave enough to actually leave the bathroom, expecting to step into total chaos and inquisition.

Instead I found a completely quiet hallway. And a quietly running if still musty smelling heater. If anybody else had noticed at all, nobody said anything.

 

But since that time, I have been scared to death of there being a fire when I turn on the heater for the first time of each season.

But this year, it’s worse.

 

I dunno if I’ve mentioned the occasionally malfunctioning sump pump in the basement my stepdad hasn’t fixed in the two years it has been doing it, but every month or so water backs up in my basement instead of being drained off. Not a huge huge amount, we’re talking like a 4 to 6 foot wet radius around the drain it’s supposed to go down…. but enough to be annoying, and to get boxes and such wet if I don’t watch where I put them.

But apparently at some point this summer, it got a bit further out, and had gotten into the bottom of the heater, and gotten trapped when the rest of the water went back down. So there was like 5 mm or so water on the bottom floor of it when I went to change the filter.

Nothing big… easily taken care of with the shopvac… only wire even near the area is a really thickly insulated power cord type of cord… and the area down there is just between the ducts and the intake anyway, so mold getting into the intake is probably the biggest issue it might cause.

But still.

After opening all the doors and windows and preparing to turn it on, I flipped the themostat, then ran back downstairs armed with my kitchen sized fire extinguisher and a giant flashlight. As if had there been a fire, it wouldn’t have produced it’s own light?

Smoke detector downstairs went off for a few minutes, then stopped. Neither of the upstairs ones went off at all. Ran fine, turned off.

This should have been the end of it, you would think.

 

But I’m still paranoid about it. I turned it back off for the night, then got up early to turn it on so that it would be warm when kiddo woke up, but it wouldn’t be running when I wasn’t awake. To do what exactly, panic? 

I’m letting it run tonight. It’s run through its cycle a few times already. I know logically that it is fine.

But I’m still a bit paranoid. “It’s kinda cool in here, shouldn’t it have kicked on yet, what if there is a problem and it shorted out and caught on fire, or what if the filter wasn’t lined up right and fell against the fan, and friction made it hotter than the furnace already was and it caught on fire?” style of thinking.

And I know the solution to such thinking is to have faith, and to give up my really pathetic illusion of being able to control…

Yet somehow that still doesn’t make it any easier to actually do so.