Got Oil?

One cold day I was going to light a fire because I was getting a chill. But to get the furnace going in my grandfathers trailer there was more involved than just turning up the thermostat. In fact, it was a manual process that involved a couple of steps. First, you had to turn a fuel oil valve to let some oil build up in the boiler area. Once the oil had covered the bottom of the boiler area you would take a small piece of paper usually some old newspaper and light it and toss it in the boiler through a little door and that would ignite the skim of oil. Once the fire burned hot enough it would stay burning until you shut the oil valve off to stop the fuel flow.

This particular day, I turned on the oil valve to let oil in the boiler area so I could light it. In the meantime, I was distracted somehow and I had forgot that the oil valve was still on and the oil was now three times the amount required to start the furnace. Because the trap door was so small it was almost impossible to extract the excess oil off, so I decided to light it anyway and take my chances. After several attempts to light the darn thing it finally started to burn and not giving it to much thought to the matter, I turned my attention to another task at hand.

After a few minutes, I heard a lot of crackling and noise coming out of the furnace and so I ran outside to see if it was still burning ok.  To my surprise, I was pretty paranoid when I noticed that not only was it burning, but like a jet engine it was throwing a 10 foot flame out the end of the chimney and the base of it was red hot. Oh no- I exclaimed “ I hope the trailer doesn’t catch on fire ! “ What a bummer- I thought as I expected the whole thing to blow up at any moment. Really there was nothing I could do at this point except to turn off the fuel valve and wait  to see if it would burn itself out.

Well to my good fortune the fire eventually burned itself out thanks to my quick reaction of shutting off the fuel valve, so that it couldn’t get any more fuel for the fire to get any larger than it already was. I was relieved that my grand fathers trailer was still standing. Gramps has been dead for years, but as long as he was alive he never found out just how close I had come to burning down his home sweat home. Thank God for small favors!