Yes!

While we're talking about fires and all, I'll remind everyone to check your smoke detectors. The time changed, will only take a few minutes, and know your family is safe.

Sad to say, we had a fatal house fire here in town this week. The lady was 72.

It's been dry and very windy here, most of our trees have dropped their leaves. The wind piles them up here around the house, fire hazard, so I had my grass man mow the yard the other day. With his leaf blower he swept them out where he could grind them into dust. I paid $40 for that, but money well spent. Might need to rake them up again?

I'm a little bit confused about you guys brushing out your chimney.

The way I understand Musher, one brush up and one brush back down. He's good to go.

Frank is running his brush at (give or take) 2,000 RPM's.

I'd think there would be some middle ground.

I've looked at these chimney brushes in stores, touched them and all. I always figured you'd use it more like a toothbrush or a floor mop. Scrub, scrub, scrub in one spot and move on down. Or up in Musher's case.

We usually runs ours a few strokes up and down to get the chimney clean. We have handles in five-foot sections so we do five feet at a time. RPMs???? I don't follow you. We simply run our brush up and down, no revolutions to it. I might add we use a square brush in a square flue.

Read Frank's post above, dated November 12. "With a cordless drill".

Not positive, but I think Frank has one of those stainless, insulated flu pipes at the camp. Round.

I was thinking you'd almost need both hands to give it a good scrubbing.

Yup, it's a UL listed, double wall assembly through the roof, then single wall flue pipe down to the wood burner. I ride the trigger on the drill for a slow turn, while moving it up and down, adding additional extensions on as needed. It's only about a 14' run from burner to terminal. And if I really have to, I could disassemble it and scrub it out at the campfire pit. Used to do that before I got the flue brush.

Maybe my creosote is different. Mine is dry and crumbles just looking at it. No scrubbing required. Are the sides of the chimney shiny smooth after a sweep? No. But it wouldn't be after the first fire, anyways.

Both my chimney's are double walled, stainless, Ul listed, etc. I couldn't get insured otherwise.

The creosote I generate is a hard, glass like coating. It is not soot. It takes a little bit of scrubbing to knock it off. I have a two-story chimney and that makes a lot of difference in creosote accumulation.

While we're talking about wood burners and all, I'll tell you this real quick.

Our deer season is in now, one day last week I was out. My daughter was working for me, I told her where I was going. I'd been out most of the day, Kimberly called me and asked where I was located. She told me there was a fire at the end of Cold Spring road, my Buddy Moe and his wife live in the last house on that road. I was hunting my way back up that way when she called.

Boy's you hate to get a call like that, I was a good ways off yet. Not knowing what to expect. I got up to where I could see their house, everything looked good, my truck was parked in the hollow, it was fine. I called Kim, told her everything was ok.

Found out later, it was the at the second house below Moe & Susan's. What happened, the best they can figure, is a spark or hot coal got woofed up out of his outdoor wood stove and set the wood pile on fire.

If someone wouldn't have been home, it would have torched the place. I don't really know the boy that lives there, but I've known Steve, his granddad forever. Bumped into Steve the other day, we talked about it. Both of us agreed that the stove should be out 50 yards from the house and woodpile. He's got the property to do that too.

But he had 2 or 3 ranks of wood, piled about shoulder high, with the stove and all, right there within 50 feet of his house. I'm sure it's handy, but he'd have been better off to spend another $1,000 for the extra water lines, electric and all.

No harm done to the house, so he was lucky. It could have been so much worse.