It happens every fall

My title is a bit of a play on the movie titled It Happens Every Spring which was one of my favorite baseball movies when I was growing up along with Angels in the Outfield, the 1951 version, because it was about the Pittsburgh Pirates. An interesting side note is that Paul Douglas is in both movies. He plays a catcher and friend of the lead character in It Happens Every Spring but he plays the manager and a lead character in Angels in the Outfield. But this post has nothing to do with baseball. It has to do with our gas fireplace. Boy, talk about getting off topic.

We have a wonderful gas fireplace. This thing is so good you could almost heat the entire house with it. And there is no smoke, no wood to split and did I mention no smoke? We don't have to worry about a chimney fire and don't have to get the chimney cleaned. We don't have a flue to worry about and no air leaks during the winter. Too good to be true? Almost. Its one problem is that every fall (see how the title works?), we have to light the pilot light and I can never remember how to do it. It's just too long between lightings for me to remember this. If it was once a month, I'd probably be OK. But doing something once a year gives me too much chance to forget how to do it. And this morning, I once again showed how well I can forget things.

The first problem is getting the glass cover off. I tried sliding it up and lifting it out like I thought I remembered doing last year but it didn't budge. Then I remembered it had something to do with getting into the lower metal grate and releasing it. How to get the metal grate open? That turned out to be the easiest job - it just tilts out. I did that after yanking and pushing and sliding the grate to no avail. Then, with the bottom grate opened and no apparent screws holding the glass cover I realized that there were two latches that held the bottom and flipped those which released the bottom of the glass cover. With the glass cover just hanging there, wonder of wonders, the glass did slide up and lift out as I remembered doing last year. My confidence took a big boost. I was going to do it. But then I couldn't remember why I needed to get the glass cover off in the first place. All the controls were in the bottom part covered by the metal grate - which was open already!

So now I had to figure out how to light the pilot. Well, actually, I first had to figure out how to get the gas flowing so I could light the pilot. And this, I'm ashamed to say, was where I finally got stuck. There were three or four knobs and switches down there and I had no idea which order to do them in. There was a knob that had three positions - "off", "pilot" and "on". I moved it to "pilot" and heard nothing. I was afraid to leave it like that because maybe the gas was flowing slowly. I finally had to ask, "Where is the manual?" I know my wife had the manual last year but she wasn't sure she remembered where she'd put it. Then she had a great idea. "Let's look it up on the Internet." We knew it was a Vermont Castings fireplace so I went to their site but they seem to make a million different gas fireplaces and none looked like ours. So now, to look up the particular manual for our fireplace, we had to find the paper manual to know which one to look for.

Finally, after I'd tried a few more configurations of knobs and switches, my wonderful wife found the manual. Then it was simple. You not only turn the knob to "pilot" but you push the knob in which starts the gas flow. Then you light the pilot either with a match (that's the only reason to remove the glass cover) or with the handy igniter switch in the lower panel. You continue to hold the knob in with the flame burning for a minute until the safety allows the flame to burn on its own. The safety causes the gas flow to stop if the pilot light goes out because it's no longer producing heat. Holding the knob in overrides the safety until there is enough heat to keep it on. After you release the knob, you turn it to the "on" position and you're done.

So that's it for this year. After getting everything back together, the very next thing I did was look for the electronic manual for our fireplace since we now had the model number from the paper manual. The electronic manual is now safely saved on my computer and ready for next fall when this will all repeat. But next year, I'll bring up my handy electronic manual and review it before attempting this again. If I can remember where I stored the manual a year from now.