First Fire

On November 24 at around 1:00 AM we fired up our new Amaizing corn furnace for the first time. Up till the night before Thanksgiving we'd been relying on our ventess gas log and electric heaters upstairs for heat this season. On Nov 23 it was cold (25ºF) and windy outside, and our house was getting cold. Our ventess gas log wasn't quite keeping up but we had run out of fuel oil last spring and vowed not to buy more. Not to mention that we were flat broke after our initial outlay of $3,400 (plus tax) for the corn furnace and another $800 for duct/chimney materials so we couldn't afford to buy any fuel oil anyway.

I'm not quite sure what happened with the thermostat wiring but I thought I had figured out how to use our Hunter digital setback thermostat to control both the corn furnace and the fuel oil furnace/central air. I was wrong.... the corn furnace just ran full blast and I was beyond tired so I disconnected the thermostat and let the furnace go into pilot burn mode and went to bed at around 3:30 AM.

I woke up too few hours later and helped my wife get ready for the Thanksgiving festivities that we were hosting this year. It was 62º F inside at 10:00 AM. Company was expected at 2:00 PM. At around noon I decided to hook up a regular old thermostat to the corn furnace and just let it hang next to the furnace. Basically the thermostat was simply an on/off switch and I turned the furnace on and went on with the preparations. By 2:00 PM it was 74 deg in the house and it must have been 90 out on the un-insulated back porch. I had other things to do so I chose to mostly ignore the hot back porch and enjoy the warm house and the company. That may have been a mistake, we used an awful lot of corn that first day.