Neighbor L asked me to come help with cleaning the pipe for their main pellet stove this morning. It turned out to be more technically challenging than I expected.
The stovepipe is 4″, and the sections have these very annoying tab-and-groove locking surfaces with which I’m mostly unfamiliar except to vaguely recall that other times when I encountered them they turned out to be, well, very annoying. Getting it apart was hard enough: Getting it back together was starting to look impossible.
I’ve mentioned before that D and L had long since divided their house’s maintenance needs into fairly rigid territories, and each kept the peace by carefully not infringing on his or her mate’s territory. They’re both kind of OCD in such matters, which can be entertaining to watch as long as I’m not stuck in the middle. Alas, the stovepipe is firmly in D’s territory, and he’s been badly hampered by some injuries and declining health, including a couple of recent TIAs which have done nothing to improve his ability to verbally communicate. He can’t walk at all, and only stubbornness has kept him from resorting to a wheelchair.
So L and I got the pipe apart and brushed out without any serious problems, but then were stumped as to how to put it back together. This was all in their big living room: D was in his chair watching the whole thing, no doubt in mounting frustration at not being able to brush me out of the way and just f*cking do it. He clearly understood where we were going wrong and kept trying to explain how to do it right. I, being stuck, was trying to seriously listen to his instruction but he wasn’t making a lot of sense. L, having lived with this for over a year now and not the most patient of souls at the best of times, was ignoring him when I was hoping she’d, you know, interpret.
Finally I either independently figured out what I’d been doing wrong or what he had been valiantly trying to tell me sank in, maybe a combination of the two, and it all went together like a child’s jigsaw puzzle. Happy smiles all around and the tension level in the room went down remarkably.
At least it wasn’t a pointless exercise: we got quite a lot of soot out of that pipe. I really thought pellet stoves burned cleaner than that.
I’m sorry to hear that D’s so impaired. Any chance he’ll recover in part or whole?
Regardless, they’re both lucky to have you there to help.
Best wishes and Merry Christmas to all of you.
The answer to that may come swiftly. Next week he has an appointment we’ve waited for for over a month, that will look specifically for the cause of the pain he’s suffering from his hip replacement and that has grown steadily till now he can’t walk at all. Doctors have thrown up their hands and declared that there’s nothing wrong with the hip beyond a persistent infection, but the pain has to have some specific cause that can be treated.
It’s wearing him down. He can’t hope to recover until he can at least move without crippling pain.
Best of luck to him.
Asking Santa to bring D a swift resolution, perhaps in the form of a 2nd or 3rd well-formed opinion.
“nothing wrong with the hip beyond a persistent infection” is not nothing. Good doctors know when to throw up their hands and grab somebody else who just might say “well, there’s your problem!”.
Having just installed my woodstove’s new piping, I can say without reservation that I HATE those snap-together pipes. And the instructional video was all a lie. Next time I’m paying for the good stuff even if my loved ones have to take on second jobs and go to bed hungry.
Merry Appropriate Holiday Greetings and a quick recovery to all!