So, you've heard the saying that where there's smoke, there's fire.  Believe it.  Assuming there's fire where you see smoke just might save your life, and some valuable possessions, like your home.  Don't worry about calling a fire department when you have smoke in your home.  Just do it and let them decide how serious it is.  That's what I did.

It's now a few minutes after one in the morning, and I'm wired.  The smell still in this house might be from the smoke caused by the heater that apparently caused it, or some of it might be coming off me.  We went to bed about 10:30, went sound asleep.  Thanks to my wife's sensitive nose, she woke up smelling smoke.  When she turned on the lights, she found the house full of smoke - lots of thick smoke.  We dashed around the house looking for problems.  I checked the attic.  No smoke there, and that was a relief.  We checked all the electrical appliances and found nothing, but the smoke was still coming.  That's when I told the wife to call the fire department.

I live in a small town of just 6,000 people, but a small army showed up to take care of my smoke problem.  A good dozen men, two big trucks and four other smaller trucks, came to my home.  They crawled around my attic, looked in closets, checked everything electrical, and then came to the same conclusion I had reached - that it was the heater.  This house has a heat pump system, and the compressor blew up on the outside unit back in September.  We didn't have the four thousand bucks it would take to put in a new one, so I shut the system down.  At least I thought I did.  The breaker outside had been thrown, but not the one for the inside heating and blowing unit.  It's off, but it's still connnected to electricity.  Something went wrong, apparently, and it got hot . . . even without being on. 

Once that was determined, the breaker was thrown to cut off power to it.  Tomorrow I'll call a heating specialist and have them make sure it's shut down to where it can't cause a fire.  Before long, we'll start tearing out all that heat pump stuff to be replaced with a traditional heating/cooling system.  My wife has gone back to bed, but I'm still up so I can check the house for smoke.  The firemen spent an hour here checking my house carefully to make sure there were no fires.  They said to get it checked tomorrow, to call them again if we needed them.

Yeah, my home town is small, but it has a really good fire department.  In this country, which is heavily wooded terrain, brush fires are dangerous business.  Not only does the town of Brady have a fairly big fire department, all the small towns around here have departments as well.  Raising money for rural fire departments is a common thing in this country, and I always try to support them.   And Brady, Texas, where we live, is an old town with a lot of old houses.  My house is only about a dozen years old, but even new houses burn sometimes.  I'm glad we called them tonight.  My only mistake was waiting so long, maybe fifteen minutes while I checked for fire first.  I should have called them immediately.

That's good advice for anyone.  When you have dense smoke, call right now, especially if you're an old fart like me.  At my age, I'm limited when it comes to checking out tight places.  They aren't, and they're pros.

So, where there's smoke . . . there's also a good reason for making that call to your local fire department.  Beside, you'll get a chance to meet some really nice folks.

PMC, 2/12/08