Snow underfoot squeaked with each step I took. It was a sound I learned the meaning of as a kid. It was too cold to play outdoors. Brutally cold breezes moved mist-fine snow particles from place to place in my backyard. Turning toward the woodshed where my husband’s outdoor furnace stood, my breath sent a column of mist into the air. The stovepipe above the furnace sent smoke into the wind as if mimicking the mist.

I didn’t like this furnace. When my husband built it, he promised to take care of its feeding and cleaning. And he did, except when he had to be away like today. Unlike the wood furnace we once had in the basement of our house, this one was large and took huge chunks of wood. I dragged three logs closer to the furnace door and struggled to lift them into the red ember-lined firebox. Having fed an entire tree to the monster, I returned to the house.

Arnie must have not liked the outdoor furnace either. We only used it for two winters. One day, I found him in the basement installing a new furnace. I hadn’t even known he was shopping for a new one! He never told me who he bought it from and unfortunately, I never asked. The brand new, shiny machine was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Arnie admitted, “With the outdoor furnace, we lost too many BTU between the fire and the heat converter in the house.”

This furnace, wherever it came from, burned wood pellets that came in forty-pound bags. A large hopper on the side of it could hold three and a half bags. That usually took care of heating the entire house for a day and a half, but when it was very cold, it needed to be refueled every 12 hours. Arnie took care of most of the refueling of the furnace, but he did all its cleaning and maintenance.

We were still heating the house when Arnie suddenly died on April 2, 2007. The shock of his unexpected death was followed a couple days later with the horrifying realization that I was now in charge of the Traeger wood pellet furnace. How often did it need to be cleaned? How did a person go about cleaning it?

Tammie found a service manual for Traeger furnaces online and printed one out for me. Mike, my son-in-law, read the cleaning instructions and walked me through each step of unscrewing the face plates so I could clean out the soot and ash from the heat exchanger pipes.

Arnie had stored bags of cherry pits from Door County in our shed, which he wanted to try out in the pellet furnace. One day my brother-in-law and I discovered that rats had chewed some of the bags open. We just swept up the pits and put them into fresh bags.

Inadvertently, we swept up a nail from the shed floor. When I fed the cherry pits to the furnace, a nail damaged the motor that slowly fed the pellets/cherry pits to the fire. This was when I realized what an unusual furnace Arnie had bought.

I started to call around for service but could find no one to help. Everyone I talked to knew about pellet stoves that warmed one room but had never heard of a pellet furnace. It took me a very long time to figure out what was wrong with my exotic, hybrid house heater, and get replacement parts.

I eventually found a business in British Columbia, Canada, who sold Traeger Furnaces. I called them several times begging for help, advice, or even some idea of who had sold Arnie the furnace. Finally, I found a Central Wisconsin business that could help me.

A few years ago, I sold the Traeger wood pellet furnace to a man who knew how to service it. He said it was in good condition because I’d taken such good care of it. That made me feel good.

 Then I bought a new furnace, the fifth furnace this house has had since I moved here in 1979. It burns LP and doesn’t need a chimney. I like telling people that I have changed furnaces more often than some people change their bed linen!