Continuing the last post, we’ve been slowly getting some work done on the heating utensils of Purgatory. Last year we scraped by with minimal knowledge of our furnaces, but the dust and filth spurred us to get a few things sorted out before the cold months arrived this year.
One of the simplest tasks was to minimize the smell. Because our furnaces burn diesel (aka heating oil), and they reside in a closet that was once part of the original garage and is now Agent Smith’s office, things can get a little pungent. While we have removed the piece of cardboard the previous owners used to block the exterior air vent in the furnace closet, and installed some felted tape to better insulate the giant mirrored closet doors, there is always a faint odor during the winter months.
The main culprit for the smell are two of these filter canisters. They can get a little goopy, but I took a suggestion from the guy who serviced the furnaces and bought some aluminum baking tins and filled them with cat litter. The result, as you can see below, should minimize much of the smell this winter. We also removed the wadded mess of furnace manuals that were so soaked in fuel that the pages were slick and stinky. I scanned all the pages in, uploaded the files to our house wiki and tossed out the originals. (Yes we have a house wiki–it’s where we store links to manuals, county information and other documents.)
