My husband, the problem-solver
Whenever he has a problem that can’t be solved by existing solutions, Beat invents a new gadget. Me … I still cling to magical thinking.
Last month, my husband almost burned down our house. It was Oct. 14, the first wintery Saturday of the season. I had set out in the morning with my fat bike to take my first big bite out of winter on the higher slopes of Rocky Mountain National Park. While I was pushing the bike through knee-deep drifts, Beat was stoking the wood stove in our house. He had returned from Switzerland only two days earlier and was still jet-lagged and acclimating to the altitude, so he left around lunchtime to scramble up his favorite off-trail route to South Boulder Peak. After he fired up the stove, Beat heard a strange crackling sound and saw that some of the metal on the stove pipe was starting to turn red. He jumped into action, shutting off the airflow to the stove and throwing a chimney extinguisher flare into the woodbox.
That was pretty much the end of it. Yes, I was exaggerating when I said that Beat almost burned down the house. But he was still shaken up by the incident when I returned from my fat bike adventure. I was, too, given how rattled he seemed when he’s usually so stoic about such things.
Later, when I told my mom the story, she laughed and recounted memories of my family’s old wood stove. Dad felled trees from my grandfather’s property, dragged them out by hand, split every log with a single ax, and always cleaned the chimney himself, Mom remembered proudly. Of course, at the beginning of nearly every winter, one of the neighbors would pound on the door because they saw flames shooting out of our chimney.
“That’s just what happens when creosote burns off,” Mom said. I could almost hear her shrugging over the phone.
“Mom, that’s extremely dangerous,” I protested. “We have a neighbor who lost her home to a chimney fire just a few years ago. She barely got out with her four dogs.”
After I hung up, I smiled at the image of Dad taking a chainsaw to the hulking trunks of dead aspens and pines, of him and my grandfather in their leather gloves and flannel shirts, carrying the load to Grandpa’s truck. And he used to climb onto the roof to sweep the chimney! Beat and I are not nearly so rugged — or I should say, we’ve assessed the danger of these activities and determined that these are tasks much better left to experts who exchange risk for cash.
We’ve hired out for professional chimney sweeping every year since we moved to Colorado. But last year, we paid a bored-seeming young man $800 to spend less than an hour vacuuming out the stove and leaning a ladder against the roof to do … well … we’re not sure if he did any real cleaning. What he did do was remove one of the stove pipe’s lower caps and then never replace it. The resulting backdraft caused our stove to burn extremely poorly for most of the season. It took us that long to figure out what was wrong.
We blamed that season’s supply of firewood and tried everything to coax the logs to burn. I’d walk around the driveway gathering bits of dried needles and twigs to throw on the smoldering mess. When I opened the door to the wood stove, smoke poured into the house, filling my lungs with carbon monoxide and setting off the fire alarm, which prompted a call from the alarm company that I had to awkwardly diffuse. I’m ashamed to say these incidents sparked panic attacks more than once. I told Beat I refused to touch the stove when I was home alone. He reminded me that we couldn’t realistically heat the house another way.
Our home in Boulder’s foothills is spacious and lovely, but it’s also drafty and downright impossible to heat. We have electric underfloor heating that works to a degree. That degree keeps the house heated to about 60 degrees, and it’s expensive to do so. On the coldest days, we wake up to indoor temperatures in the low 50s. It’s manageable, but not comfortable. So we subsidize with a wood stove. It works wonderfully when it’s working. But dealing with all of the stove’s problems last year was a true test of resolve. And of course, all of that smoky burning left behind a lot of creosote.
After the Oct. 14 incident, Beat reacted in exactly the way I’ve come to know and love him: He declared his independence from crappy workmanship and threw every possible solution toward the problem. He bought several more chimney fire extinguishers. He bought a chimney sweeping kit and sacrificed another afternoon while I was out on a bike adventure to scrape the stove pipe completely clean. He bought a thermometer that could precisely gauge the temperature inside the stove. The thermometer featured an alarm that started blaring when the temperature rose above 600 degrees. The sound the alarm made was so shrill and upsetting that I warned Beat I was likely to have a panic attack and become a useless mess if it ever went off. I have a lot of unresolved trauma from that stove.
Beat realized that to keep the stove from becoming too hot or too cold — let alone burning near its happy temperature of 500 degrees — he needed to adjust the damper constantly. “I am becoming a slave to the stove,” he complained.
For Beat, there’s a solution to this, too. It’s a solution I like to believe is truly unique to him — at least as a tech-savvy individual trying to solve a problem with a relatively archaic implement like a wood stove. He went online and ordered a small motor and electronic components. Some nights, he was in his workshop soldering circuit boards. Others, he was out in a garage, milling metal parts on his CNC machine. Others, he was on his laptop writing the software for the gadget he was engineering. These are all Beat’s cherished hobbies. He engineers for fun. But when his devices can serve a meaningful purpose that can’t be fulfilled in any other way, he becomes a man on a mission.
On Wednesday (Nov. 8), I was having a bad day. When I woke up, my brand new phone which I’ve only had for three weeks had shut down and would not reboot. It was dead. Kaput. I had to scramble to figure out what I needed to manage my day phoneless, which is not so easy in modern times. I searched online to find the time for my appointment with my physical therapist since I no longer had a text message to remind me, dug through my things for the plastic access card to my gym since I no longer had the app, and found a paperback to read while I languished in a post-allergy-shot haze awaiting the all-clear from my allergy clinic.
The town errands went okay — the fact I feel like a pin cushion after the double whammy of allergy shots and PT dry needling notwithstanding — and I headed home in the dreary weather. I wasn’t mad it was 37 degrees and raining — after all, I had only the day before written an essay about my dismay over November’s scorching start. But my feelings changed when I arrived at the base of the only road home and found a police car blocking the lane. The officer informed me that a semi-truck — large trucks are legally not allowed on this narrow, winding mountain road — had gotten stuck and was blocking the entire road. She didn’t know how long it would take to remove the truck — 30 minutes? Two hours? I was scheduled to start my work shift in 45 minutes and I had left my laptop at home. I didn’t even have a phone to call my co-workers and let them know about my predicament.
These stuck semis on Flagstaff Road have become such a reoccurring problem that it’s become a talking point on my neighborhood’s Nextdoor page. In fact, one neighbor saw this truck heading up the road and posted a warning before it was even stuck: “53’ semi-trailer heading up Flagstaff at 12:40pm. It passed us around 1.5 mile and likely will be getting stuck on the hairpins.”
Of course, I did not have my phone to see this alert and probably wouldn’t have been able to avoid the road closure even if I had. Still, I was exceedingly annoyed. The officer told me that most of the residents she’d talked to were choosing to wait for the road to reopen. But I decided to risk the long way home. This route involves driving halfway to the city of Golden and up Coal Creek Canyon in order to loop in front of Gross Reservoir on the narrow and hilly gravel road that serves as dam access. This route adds another 45 minutes to the drive on a good day. And the cold rain was quickly turning to wet, icy snow.
Coal Creek Canyon was a nail-biter of an uphill drive with an inch of icy shush on the pavement and a near-white-out blizzard of thick snowflakes accumulating rapidly. I drove the canyon road faster than I should have, not wanting to be too late for work. But that recklessness ended quickly when I turned onto Gross Dam Road. The gravel was slicked with a layer of sheet ice — likely from freezing rain — that had been covered with at least two inches of wet snow. There was no traction at all.
My Subaru Outback has decent winter-rated tires and I thought I’d be okay if I took it slow. Still, even creeping along at 10 mph has no effect when gravity takes hold and the tires are as good as skis. As I started down the hill, the car accelerated rapidly. I pumped the brakes to no avail. There was nothing for the tires to grab. As I slid out of control toward a switchback, I looked to my left and right for an appropriate tree to turn the wheel toward — because hitting a tree was preferable to careening off the switchback into a ravine.
Brains are so strange. As I was contemplating which tree to hit, I felt completely calm about it. I’m a basket case when a stove alarm is blaring, but my brain actually manages to remain rational when I’m in real danger. Luckily, I did not have to make this decision, as the tires finally found a bit of gravel to grab and the pumping brakes took hold. I let out a gasping breath — I had been holding it for at least 30 seconds. Home was still ten miles away, and I was now just as wary of turning around as continuing forward. So I did the only thing I could do — drive exceedingly carefully, using only the brakes — no gas — and inching along at such slow speeds that I wondered if it might just be better to park the car and walk the rest of the way home. The climb away from the dam was not better. Still, Subaru performed admirably, clawing its way through layers of snow and ice as I pressed the gas pedal strategically. Finally, I made it home. Although my anxiety had stayed in control, I was still a stew of adrenaline and cortisol after the stressful drive.
“It’s done!” Beat exclaimed as I rushed into the house. I was supposed to log in for work a half hour earlier, so I replied “That’s great!” — not knowing exactly what I was praising — before burying my head in my laptop. Still, once I had tapped out a few messages, I couldn’t help but venture back into the front room, warmed by the flickering glow of the wood stove. There, a smooth metal damper that Beat machined himself was clicking back and forth. The damper was controlled by a motor connected to the electronics that Beat designed, guided by the software he wrote, and encased in a black plastic case that he sculpted to a perfect fit on his 3D printer. A digital display indicated the fire was burning at an ideal 498 degrees.
The device still needed some finishing touches — another 3D printed case so it could be affixed to the front of the stove while the electronic box and its attached motor stayed behind the metal door at the bottom of the stove. But in less than a month, we had gone from homeowners with out-of-control creosote in the chimney to homeowners whose stove can now burn efficiently at all times with minimal input from us. Even though I had to get back to work, I couldn’t help but sit next to the warm stove, mesmerized by the whir of the motor, gentle clicking of the damper, and fluctuating digits on the display, all striving to maintain an optimal temperature of 500 degrees.
“I can’t believe it,” I said to Beat as the stove’s perfect warmth broke through my foul mood. “You automated a wood stove.”
While I admit that I understand little about what goes into Beat’s spare-time engineering hobby (I’m sure he’ll have to correct me on a few mistakes in this post), and while I do become irritated about the bits of electronics and shreds of 3D printing filament that are strewn around the house at all times, and while his garage is downright horrifying — resembling the lair of a mad scientist — I am always in awe of the things he creates. These gadgets are complex, unique, and exceedingly useful. He’s an inventor.
All the while, if I lived alone and it had been solely up to me, I would have just stopped using the wood stove. I would have pulled my winter sleeping bag down from storage to cocoon myself on frigid mornings, and taken hot baths to get through the evenings. Would I prefer this? Of course not. But I write this to point out how different we are. Beat is a problem-solver. I am a problem-avoider. Or, more aptly, I’d rather find workarounds than confront a problem head-on.
Of course, avoidance is nearly always the wrong approach. When I was confronted with the road closure because of the stuck semi, I chose to take a long way around on a less-maintained back road that I knew was likely to be in terrible condition, and because of this I nearly crashed my car. My more rational neighbors chose to wait, or they tried Gross Dam Road and wisely turned around, or they got through Gross Dam Road on studded snow tires and warned everyone else on Nextdoor that “I would avoid it now 100%.” I like to imagine that Beat would have parked his car near the roadblock, pulled on his studded shoes and puffy jacket, and started running up a nearby trail — veering off near Flagstaff Summit to return to the road and yell at the idiot truck driver — before continuing along the trail toward home.
What I mean to say is there is some madness to his method, but I’m so lucky to have this problem-solver in my life. ❤️
Hey, That is what a man likes. No medal is equal to a lady honestly and accurately admiring his works. In his mind that spells, "LOVE."
Dang! Beat can automate our wood stove anytime!