My father always told me that when you are working around fuel, you should never be smoking a cigarette, pipe, or cigar.
He said it was nothing but a recipe for disaster.
I remembered this all my life. Whenever I was working on a car, I made sure to not let anyone smoke in the garage. I guess I thought that anyone who worked had this mentality. You shouldn’t smoke around anything that was flammable, and that included HVAC units. I never thought I would have an opportunity to tell a professional HVAC worker this, but it happened. I was upstairs one day, working while the HVAC worker was doing some repairs on my gas furnace. I thought I heard an odd noise, but I didn’t give it a second thought. It wasn’t until I thought I smelled the faint odor of smoke, that I began to panic. I ran to the door and went into the basement. The HVAC tech was stomping out some papers and she looked a bit wide-eyed. She apologized and said she had already called her HVAC business for assistance. She had been smoking and by some freak accident, the ashes got into the gas furnace, and the wiring caught fire. She promised that if the gas furnace wasn’t able to be fixed, the HVAC business would purchase a brand current gas furnace for me. I was wondering if I should call my homeowners insurance, just in case they reneged on this promise. They could deal with the HVAC business for me. I figured I may as well wait for the owner of the HVAC business to show up, and talk to me about my gas furnace.