Funny, isn’t it, how we often line ourselves up to be easy targets for life to give us a good kick up the backside. I do, anyway, and it happened again today. And the cause of it was that old enemy, procrastination, that has caught me out so many times in the past.<\/p>\n
I haven’t tried to use my wood burner ever since I had the problems about two weeks ago with smoke coming out of the air inlets. It hasn’t been much of a hardship because we’ve been enjoying some pleasantly warm days, and during the evenings when the temperature has dropped a bit, I’ve been making do with my little fan heater. Trouble is, though, that we’ve suddenly entered a bit of a cold snap. The same thing happened this time last year and although the forecast is for the temperature to start getting back into the 20’s Celsius in a week or so’s time, in the meantime the temperature is going to stay low and the wood burner will be more or less essential.<\/p>\n
I haven’t sat on my hands and done nothing, though, in the meantime. The signs are that my flue is blocked by ash and clinker, which I need to clear out before I attempt to light the stove again. I came across a handy little chimney-sweep’s kit while perusing the weekly wad of ‘promos’ that arrive in my post box every Monday, which I ordered and which has been standing leaning against the wall in my kitchen waiting for me to make use of it. The trouble was that I wanted to do it from the top down, as if I shoved the brush upwards, I’d have needed to remove my capping slab anyway so as not to knock it off when the brush emerged from the top of my chimney, potentially causing damage to my roof. Also, a ‘top-down’ approach would have allowed me to wrap the stove in an old dust-sheet, thereby preventing any soot and clinker that was dislodged from being able to enter the room. The trouble was, though, that I just hadn’t got around to doing it \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n
I’ve started every day with a firm resolve that ‘today will be the day to go up onto the roof’. But something else a bit more appealing always seemed to crop up, which was fine all the time it looked as though the weather was on a ‘warming up’ curve. But today things came to a head, with a forecast of chilly days for the next week or so and with rain too, starting later on today<\/em>. So I knew that I had to get cracking while I had a final opportunity to do so while it was dry, but still I was distracted by ‘this’, then by ‘that’ and then it was lunch time. And afterwards I had to make a pot of tea and check my emails and then, of course, catch up with the news. Oh, and don’t forget the ‘small ads’, just in case there’s the odd bargain or two to be had that might come in handy. And then, goodness, look at the time. It’s gone 4 o’ clock, soon be time to think about this evening’s dinner…<\/p>\n But wait a minute! The forecast said that it would start raining this evening, so now I REALLY DID need to make the effort. So I did just that and got my working togs on to go up onto the roof, and went outside. It had already started raining, so I was too late. By procrastinating, I’d missed my opportunity, and it wouldn’t come again for a while. So what to do? I refused to be beaten (even though the circumstances were wholly my own fault) and resolved to at least do something and try carefully pushing my sweep’s brush upwards from the bottom, taking extreme care not to push too many rods up, causing the brush to pop out at the top. So that’s what I did, never realising where my laziness in not starting when I should have was leading me.<\/p>\n I pushed the brush into the flue inside the roof of my wood burner and shoved the first metre of rod up, moving it up and down in the process. I was gratified to see a large amount of clinker and ash fall down into the grate and, pleasingly, very little soot. So having got the first length of rod in, I attached a second and repeated the process. It got a bit stiffer and yet more clinker and ash fell down. So I attached another and repeated the process yet again. Then … everything went smooth and quiet. I withdrew the rods that I’d shoved up unscrewing them as I did so, and found out the reason why. The connector into which I’d screwed the second rod had pulled out of the end of the first one leaving it and the brush on its top up inside the flue.<\/p>\n I’ve asked myself many times why it was that the Western World should have decided to shut down much of its manufacturing, making millions of its workers redundant in the process, so it could buy in container loads of badly designed, poorly manufactured rubbish that doesn’t work, from China. And I did so yet again today, but those weren’t the words that I actually used when I found out what had happened. OK, it won’t be a disaster, but now I will have to go up onto the roof and shove something down my wood burner flue from the top – not to clean it, but to get my chimney sweep’s brush out again. When will I be able to do that? Heaven knows, if it rains as frequently as the weather forecast has said it will.<\/p>\n Would things have turned out differently if I hadn’t wasted my time and climbed onto my roof when I should have done? I think they might have, because the main pressure on the joints between the rods would have been pushing, downwards, in the direction that the clinker and ash would have been falling. But I’ll probably never know, as I’ll probably have to modify the rods before I use them again and securely attach the end connectors, by eg small pop rivets. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not kicking myself for procrastinating for so long. Have I learnt my lesson? Maybe … \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Funny, isn’t it, how we often line ourselves up to be easy targets for life to give us a good kick up the backside. I do, anyway, and it happened again today. And the cause of it was that old enemy, procrastination, that has caught me out so many times in the past. I haven’t … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6027"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6040,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6027\/revisions\/6040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}