Been considering the options for cleaning the soot off the cover once spring arrives and hey presto! sail cleaners who have yurt cleaning experience, awesome.
Speaking of cleaning, Boxing Day was a bit of a disaster, I threw a few BIG chunks of house coal on the fire and shut it down before going out for a couple of hours. Unfortunately the coal didn't actually catch, it just smouldered, and smoked, leaking from the annoyingly leaky Prity fire (I suspect as it gets used more, it distorts more and leaks more). By the time I returned, the entire yurt was filled with acrid coal smoke, EVERTHING stank of coal, and it's not a nice countryside smell, it's the smell of pure nasty. Not a good position to be in, yurt full of smoke, one door, no extractor, think fast!!! Ah! leafblower! Zzzzingningningningning and we're off. After about 30 mins of pumping heaven knows how many thousands of cubic metres of fresh air in though the front door, the smoke was gone. The smell however, was not.
The remainder of the day was spent shampooing the carpet, emptying copious amounts of stink neutralising freshener in though the yurtcon and wiping down every single surface that had collected a sulphurous layer of soot.
Seriously, I've got the proper hump with coal, ok so you could say that if the fire didn't leak, that the smoke would have gone up the flue, but even so, the chunks of soot and smut that fluttered down from the flue like some sort of black snow would have still stained the roof cover. In addition to that, the smoke actually wrecked my carbon monoxide detector which was comically flashing it's "Service" light, as if anything electronic from China could ever be serviced.
Lesson learnt I guess, stay away from the cheap coal and start looking for a less leaky fire though 2011.
