Scariest job?

SeanBeans

@retiredguy

That’s insane.

Solid_Fuel_Man

Drunk guy holding loaded firearm to your head about a blower motor bill.... oh my!

Intplm.

I would have called the police and had him thrown in jail....merry xmas !

rick in Alaska

I had a no heat call about 8:00 on a Friday night that came in when I was getting ready to finish for the night. This is a 500,000 btu boiler running a carwash at a gas station. I asked the guy how many times he hit the reset button and he assured me he only hit it once. He had one of those faces you feel yo could trust, so I believed him.
I put my gauge on the output line and hit the reset button. The pressure on the gauge jumped right up but the transformer was dead. I was ecstatic because I figured I would be able to change out the transformer in about ten minutes, fire it up, and be home for dinner. I installed the new transformer and confidently hit the reset button to get it going. The burner lit right off, and the resulting explosion blew the 10" damper right off the back of the stack and across the room. It was 12:30 before I got done sucking all the excess oil out of the firebox, which was so saturated I could wring the oil out of it, and getting it so I could safely run it. That thing burned in the firebox for two hours with the burner off.
Moral of the story: if there are multiple employees at a job, find out how many others pushed the button! Also, never assume it will be easy.
Rick

BruceLundeen

It is getting better now, but it used to be anytime I worked in a downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul basement. If there were no lights - which there often were not - you kept your flashlight pointed directly in front of you or pointed at what you were working on and didn't look to either side. At best you, would use the rest of the day up giving statements to the Police and newspaper.

flat_twin

Erin, thanks for reviving this thread. Enjoyed reading those stories again.

Erin Holohan Haskell

Thanks, @flat_twin. Same here!

GroundUp

I may have told this story before, but since we're here... Once upon a time when I was a young cubby, we were working a boielr room remodel in a VA hospital. Break room was right next to the boiler room, took me quite awhile to realize the morgue was just on the other side of the wall from where I ate my lunch every day which creeped me out enough but not as much as the Dr Kevorkian character in the elevator with an amputated leg under a bloody sheet on his way to the morgue. "Dude, check this out". Anyway, later on that job we were demo-ing an old steamer (Cleaver Brooks if I remember correctly) with a gas axe and when it got to the bottom framework there was an old leather glove buried in the dust under the boiler. Oh well, just sweep it up. But the glove wasn't empty. Turns out it wasn't a glove at all, but a mummified human hand. We never decided if it got pinched off of some poor sap 60 years earlier while setting the boiler, or if there was a funny guy in the morgue 30 feet away that figured some stupid apprentice would need to wear his brown pants at some point down the road.

More recently however, about a year ago, I was in a medical research building piping the refrigeration for some new coolers. This was a place that used cadavers for science, and the whole building smelled as such. As a grown-**** man, I would have to fight myself every morning to go in there (death and I are not friends, I am terrified of that sort of thing to the point that I will not even go to a memorial service) so it was hard enough already BUT I needed access to a special room for a condensate drain and they let me in there no problem. Until I got inside- there was a problem. This room was being used for some sort of research where they had wiring and computers and the whole 9 yards attached to cadavers and were using electrical waves to move muscles in the body. Cold, blue, corpses with their arms and legs flailing around. I have never thrown up so much in all my life. Moral of the story is that I did not finish the condensate piping.

Solid_Fuel_Man

Wow! "I have never throw up so much in my life" takes the cake.....eh.....mummies!

Erin Holohan Haskell

These stories never get old.

MikeL_2

         I was an apprentice in the late winter of the early 70's during the oil embargo; we were on a job where a couple had gone through a contentious divorce. The husband abandoned the property thinking his ex wife would stay behind with their pets, and the wife thought the same about her ex. The result was horrific - we were told several cats &  3 or 4 dogs were rescued, barely alive, after weeks without food - there was pee & poop everywhere in the 60 year old, 10, 000 square foot residence.
    The heating systems had run out of fuel - 12 bathrooms & 3 kitchens suffered a staggering amount of frozen fixture & piping damage. Most of the water piping in the 2 story basement survived.
     Several times during the first days of the months long repair process, I would distinctly hear the journeyman I was training with call to me from the 2cd or third floor; as I made my way from the basement, I would meet up with him in one of the 3 stairwells - he was headed to meet me because he distinctly heard me call him by name - neither of us had called out.
    After our third day on site, our boss got us walkie-talkies and things got even more weird. While working in the basement I would hear a dog bark or a cat meow - I called Dan on the walkie - talkie and before I said a word Dan asked if I heard a dog bark. We were both spooked and decided to work together as much as possible from then on. Other tradesmen had similar experiences on that project and we learned several months after the job was completed that one or more pets had died in the house when abandoned........
    

Intplm.

Once repelling
down a well to replace a foot valve

EdTheHeaterMan

It seems that everyone who comes to my home anymore is wearing a mask! For months, red masks, black masks, cloth masks, paper masks! It's scary!

Usually, when a heating system fails from wildlife, the animal is dead. The only scary service call I went on in my 40+ year career was a no-heat where there was wildlife in the vent pipe. It must have put the stack relay out of step. When I got the burner running there was noise in the vent connector. I opened the draft control and looked in to find a frantic squirrel jump at me then run around the basement. Scared the living crap out of me. I look at it now as a funny experience, not a scary one. But at the time...

How do you charge a customer for letting a wild squirrel into their basement? Ah, The good old days, when there were stack relays and ungrateful customers.

I had fun reading all the old ones from the beginning! Thanks @Erin Holohan Haskell & @DanHolohan

Intplm.

Intplm. said:

Once repelling
down a well to replace a foot valve

Really happened! I Was going down this old dug well pit and a snake came out of the wall of the well as I was repelling down the wall in a very tight inside the well location.

dhersh

As a young engineer I was given an assignment to survey a state hospital in preparation for a large renovation project. I arrived at the site and needed to enter a patient area. First, I took apart the panelboard that served the area and discovered all the fuses had been removed and replaced with 1/2" copper pipe. Next I went into the room and was greeted by one of the attendants and I told him what I needed to do. I started my survey when I discovered one of the patients coming up behind me. At that point another attendant ran up and blocked the patient from touching me. He then told me that this particular individual was known to sneek up on people and attempt to use his thumb to flick out your eyeball. evidently, he has been successful on a number of occasions. I immediately stopped, went back to my office and told my boss that I was not going back into that room without someone to watch this individual. Fortunately, I still have both eyes!

Handyman 242

I was a young service man and the welfare department asked our company if we would do an emergency oil burner repair for one of their clientes. I knocked on the the front door and was told to go around to the side door of the house. A very old smelly man answered and told me to follow him. i walked down several cellar stairs and the stairs stopped and all I saw were old newspapers. The whole basement was filled with newspapers from floor to ceiling. He had a narrow path about 2 feet high wide and 2 feet wide between the newspapers and the ceiling for me to access the boiler. As I reluctantly crawled my way to the boiler, he had a small alcove off the side of the path where he actually lived on top of the newspapers. There was food there and a small lamp. The person upstairs was his tenant he collected rent from. As I got to the the oil boiler I found if was off on ignition failure. There was no space to the left or right or back of the boiler as if was completely filled with newspapers from floor to ceiling. There was no way for be to determine if the bottom of the boiler was soaked with oil. At this point I said there is no way for me to get out of here if the newspapers go on fire. I told him I was going outside for a different tool and never returned.

mvickers

On the next visit, I saw, took pics of the footprints.

Old church, padlocked, exterior storm cellar doors to the boiler rm, 2 co-workers there to check a boiler prob.

One left to get something from his trk, and when he returned, his partner said that some movement at the bottom of the stairs caught his attn, and looking up, thinking he'd see his bud...nothing.  As they were leaving, one of them just happened to look at the floor at the bottom of the stairs, and in the dust, there were small, very clear barefoot prints.  Def NO usual reason for them to be there

Jack

Back in about '79 I was working on a small place up on the side of Mt St Helena, at the northern end of the Napa Valley, overlooking Calistoga. It was the servant housing for the main house and was about 24' sq. It had an old four glass fusebox under the house on the far side from the outside crawl space access. One of the fuses was blown. The whole side of that mtn is alive with rattlesnakes and I would regularly see them while rock climbing up in the Palisades about a 1/2 mi down the ridge. I was alone, it was getting dark. All I had was a old Aluminum D-cell battery flashlight. The ones that when working only shot a beam about 6' and it was not working well at all. It was one of those I would bang to try keeping it working. I had to go under and I was dying. it was about a 16-18" crawl space and I was scared to go under. Petrified, really, but I had to finish and get home, so I had the fuse and in I went. All was well. Got all the way across, replaced the fuse and I could see the light filter through cracks in the floor. I shinnied around on my belly. You could not roll over. To tight. The flashlight was failing and failed and I needed to get out of there. Once turned, in the dim light of dusk only, I began crawling and there was a rattlesnake on either side of the access hole. I flipped out. Panic...but what do you do? I tried to go up through the floor with predictable results. It is so unpleasant to remember that moment. I managed to calm myself down, resigned to a very difficult situation. You have to finish the job. The snakes had not moved. I had to try to coax one or the other to move away from the hole. My light was out and it was getting dark outside. I had to move, so I chose to crawl off to the very dark left not knowing if I was crawling into other snakes. The left snake did crawl over to his buddy on the rt side and both moved off further to the rt. I very carefully was able to make it to the exit. I was sure I'd get stung on my way out. It may have been the worst moment. It did not happen. I was safe. I was a complete wreck, but safe. I changed under there. Ever since, even on my own home, which has a crawl space, when I reluctantly go in the hole I carry a .38 with snake shot. Also, when we remodeled the house I put a lot of lights in the crawl space, so I can see what is under there. That whole area, the Palisades and the place I was working on up on the Old Toll Rd burned a couple weeks ago in the Glass Fire. Many other homes I worked on burned as well

jamplumb

My business was in Crawford, Nebraska three miles from Fort Robinson, the place where they murdered Crazy Horse. I was on a service call at the fort in the old nurses quarters in the basement. These building were built in the 1880's and a little spooky. While we worked in the basement we could hear the entrance screen door open and slam shut then footsteps across the entry and into the building. We went upstairs to see who had entered and could find no one. I always kept a open mind out there and felt a lot of weird stuff but that was the spookiest!

Tomato

Arachnophobe? Had a no-heat call at a rental house. The tenant said that the boiler was in the basement through the cellar door on the outside. I discovered that oil burners don't work under water. It had been raining a lot. I told him to have a plumber come out and pump out the basement. He begged me to fix the heat since there were children in the house. I figured I could handle it. After finding a melted plastic sump pump I drove to the local box store and bought a new pump. The old one had melted because someone had apparently stepped on it and jammed the float into the mud floor.

After pumping out the basement, I dried out the burner, primed the oil pump and restored the hjeat. What an awful mess the basement was everything was wet except a window air conditioner resting on its fins. I was sweating because of the humidity and effort so I took off my baseball cap (AKA redneck toupee) and put it on the top of the air conditioner to keep it dry.

Once I finished, I drove a mile to a local carryout to get dinner. While waiting, I use the bathroom to wash up. I feel filthy. After washing my hands, I decided to wash my face and take off my cap. I look in the upside-down cap and discover a female Wolf spider (look it up, they are impressive). She was seeking dry ground and chose the same dry location as my cap did. Not that the cap had a choice.

I gingerly carried the cap outside and went back to the restroom and washed my hair too, just in case someone else had hidden in my cap. Yes, I took the cap home - in the back of the truck.

I later found out that the youngest "child" was a teenager.

Jamie Hall

Not scary, really, in the sense of those horror stories -- but years ago my partner and I were inspecting schools in an unnamed town in an unnamed state. You know, proper wiring, proper, plumbing, decent heat and ventilation, structurally sound, safe water supply, safe sewer, that sort of thing.

This was a very posh private boarding school for the sprogs from wealthy families in the big city. At least that's what the literature said. Coed.

We'd never been there before.

Got to the main gate, and then the admin buildings and classrooms -- all very nice. Then we went to what were alleged to be the dormitories. Converted chicken coops, and I have never before or since seen such a squalid, horrible mess. Unsanitary wasn't the word for it.

Went back to the admin building, informed the head teacher we were closing the place down as of right now and to get busses up there and get the kids evacuated to somewhere safe. Much screaming and yelling; I let my partner handle that, went to the main gate, posted the necessary signs, then we hung around until all the kids were out and padlocked the gates and left.

We were not popular... only time I ever had to do that.

Erin Holohan Haskell

It's that time of year again... 👻 🎃

EBEBRATT-Ed

I had a custodian in a school in Connecticut I used to service called early in the morning to say he got to the school and found the burner running but no flame and oil all over the floor around the boiler. He shut it off. He was going to call a local residential guy as the school was cold and we were 2 hours away and I talked him out of that.

This was a 20 gph Iron Fireman fired through one door of a Smith model 44 boiler with the combustion chamber filled in.

We got some parts together and drove there. The ignition transformer had failed as well as the flame safeguard. We installed the new parts. By this time it was about noon time and the kids were in school with no heat and a pretty bad oil smell. We cleaned up the oil around the boiler.

I told them I was not lighting the boiler without the fire dept so I called the Chief. He said he would be over at 2:00 pm and they decided to let the kids out of school before we lit it off.

We lit the burner and immediately shut it off with a lit of huffing and puffing and smoke and the fire in the chamber burned on it's own until 6:30 pm making steam without running the burner

EBEBRATT-Ed

There's some good ones on here!!

PC7060

EBEBRATT-Ed said:

“I told them I was not lighting the boiler without the fire dept so I called the Chief.”

Your experience and judgement kept this well with the scary but safe range.  Much better than rushing and ending up with a tragedy!!!

delcrossv

Maybe not scary, but certainly very odd. My older brother had bought a run down building in the city (Chicago) that had been built right after the Great Fire of 1871. Originally a hardware store, the place was a fortress 2 foot thick brick walls, true 4 x 14 joists etc.

Anyway, during the 30's to the 50's the neighborhood was really rough so the 2nd floor was used as a flophouse and a number of the wino's died there.

So we get in to start a gut rehab and pull the plywood off the boarded up window holes and take off the plaster from the rat's maze of little rooms on the 2nd floor. It was July and temps were in the mid 90's. With no windows and all the plaster gone, there was a spot that was in the 40's and clammy ( so we'd take turns there to cool off)

The annoying part was if you were working up there, and placed down a tool (hammers were a favorite) and took your eyes off it for a second it would be GONE. Happened to me, my bro and several others that were working up there. I think we bought a dozen hammers that summer.

Originally there was a staircase that went from the 2nd floor down to the front of the building. It had been removed and covered over a long time ago. My brother decided that August it would be good to put it back in. As soon as we put in the last tread, there was a huge woosh of cold air DOWN the stairs slamming the street door ( that opened IN) wide open. After that the cold spot was gone and things stopped disappearing.

Weird.

offdutytech

When I was doing DDC controls work we were retro fitting the controls and removing the building from district steam with its own stand alone boilers. I get a early in the morning one weekend that water was flowing out of pipes above a holding walk-in cooler. Had to go to the autopsy room and crawl above the cooler to find a shutoff valves for a differential pressure transducer. Flashlight in hand and in a dark ceiling space in a morgue was not ideal. Kept looking over my shoulder the whole time. Creepy to say the least. 

retiredguy

I have mentioned this before but for some of the newer guys on this site, Search for "the Dana boiler plant explosion". This will open your eyes. I have seen a few of these in my years of service with many different types of boilers including explosions, both furnace side and pressure vessel, and even a few melt downs firing nat gas, fuel oil and even coal. I am still here but have much less hair now.

Intplm.

When you never had claustrophobia until you reached an older age. Now all close closed in spaces seem a bit too closed-in. Scary !?

Kevin2020

I have a good one for Halloween. i worked as a serviceman for a fuel oil company and did many calls in rural areas, some pretty isolated. Anyway, there was a vacant house, watched by a realty company, and the call was for black soot showing in the house. The front door was actually off a large 2nd floor deck of the A-frame house. Going in there were some flakes of soot around so I suspected a blow-back. Found the stairs down and the nice red carpet got blacker the further down the stairs you went. The boiler was in a garage and upon opening the door I was met with the eeriest sight I had ever seen. Spiders had filled the garage with webs, wall to wall and floor to ceiling. The soot from the blow-back had coated every strand and highlighted the web network filling the garage. To get in I had to use a flue brush and made a tunnel over to the boiler, which was plugged with soot and desperately needed cleaning. This was the only time going into a place actually scared me. My tunnel in was the only place in the garage not packed with webbing. I cleaned the boiler, got it running right. and moved out before the spiders made their move! I didn't envy the cleaning crew as soot had covered everything on the first floor and beyond. Opening that garage door was the creepiest!

Jackmartin

This is not really scary for me but it certainly was for someone else. When I was young I was the HVAC foreman for a large hospital. Our shop was directly across the hall from the morgue. We had gotten used to it and it meant nothing more to us  than any other department. Now, it was in the fall.and we were working overtime,about eight o'clock we noticed one of the new hires mopping the morgue floor. This chap was a new Canadian and he was singing, whistling ,anything to take his mind off where he was. Sooooo, being young and stupid we thought we would play a joke on him, now I think back how could we be so mean. The morgue refrigerator had doors on both sides and you accessed the back ones in a separate room. I told my partner I would get into an empty tray and he could slide me in, okay the scene is set. I get in he pushes me in and I say in a loud strangled voice let me out I am not dead yet, HELP, and I coughed for effect. This poor man let out a scream like I have heard before or since threw his mop in a corner and ran down the hallway screaming about the undead and went home!  He would not come back to work so they sent one of the hospital's social workers to talk to him and he told the story about the undead. Well they figured out it was us and to say we were in s**t was an understatement. I had to explain myself to the sister superior who ran the hospital and I had to apologize to this man both verbally and in writing. He was really nice not angry or anything, but he said I know it wasn't you it was voodoo,  and he gave me a braided bracelet to wear so it kept the spirits away. I am still ashamed and that was over forty years ago.

FStephenMasek

EBEBRATT-Ed said:

Just last week.

Had to crawl into a dirt crawl space.... with my allergies etc.

Why not get a nice respirator? Thee are several brands, so select a brand a size which its well. The combination activated charcoal and P100 filters will even get rid of many odors. Of course, if you are an employee, all of the OSHA respiratory protection program requirements apply. Even if you are not, having a medical exam to check that you will not have problems wearing a respirator (due to breathing restriction) is a good idea.

Hvac_artisan

I was working on a new construction house by myself, most of the house was finished. the furnace was set in the mechanical room but not connected to the ductwork blowing up into the open Plenum with an LP line temporary connected to the furnace using a black flexible CSST tubing. In Wisconsin we don’t hard pipe all of our returns so I was using sheetmetal panning to block off a Joist bay. While putting in an end cap around some Romex, I nicked the Romex and saw sparks. I paused for a fraction of a second waiting for the breaker to trip as the main panel was right in the room I was working in. The breaker never tripped and instead I heard a crackling noise coming from behind the furnace. I jumped down off my 4 foot ladder grabbed my 4 foot ladder, and as I walked around the back of the furnace CSS tea tubing head flames shooting out the side of it next to the return ductwork and was igniting the floor joist above. I jumped up on my ladder put out the flames with my gloved hand, took four steps across the room hit the main breaker and then ran up he stairs and shut off LP coming to the house right below the main regulator. (‘Fortunately’ the day before I had cut my finger rather badly and was wearing a leather glove over the top of the bandage.) I was shaking for the rest of the day. 

I had only touched the hot wire in the Romax and not enough to short it to the internal ground. Because none of the sheet-metal was touching the furnace that was temp wired there was no path to ground for the ductwork so the nearest path was through the gas line running up against the duct. I don’t know if I had Knicked the outer jacket of the CSST or if it was just the easiest path to ground but I was shaking for the rest of the day from nerves and knowing that the whole house could’ve gone up in flames. If that same gas line had been ran in the finished soffit across the basement out to a fireplace or other appliance the fire could’ve easily started above the drywall and I would’ve never seen it until it was too late. Ever since then I try very hard to not run CSST for gas line, And if I do run it I use a different brand. 

Erin Holohan Haskell

Happy Halloween! 🎃 👻 Got any good stories to share?

hot_rod

I was thawing pipes in a complicated tight crawl space. Owners were off to work.
It had a lot of 15" wide openings to wiggle through partition stem walls to get to the far end. I had a small Mapp gas torch. A 1/2 hour or so into the job I hear sirens outside. Panicked thinking I had started a fire up in the wall or something.

Bruised and bleeding I back out to get outside .. nothing. No vehicles, no sounds. I crawl back down, siren sound starts again.

The owners had a macaw that had been a city bird and learned to mimic siren sounds. I'm not sure why he chose that sound on that day at that time?

Trick or treat

veteransteamhvac

I moved into my house in 1996, an old four-course brick bungalow with no central AC, just window units. My father, recently retired and nothing but time on his hands took it upon himself to arrange for central air to be installed. My new neighbors next door had recently had a 2 zone attic/basement system installed in their house at a reasonable price and recommended Cliff to us. Cliff worked for one of the larger HVAC companies in town and at night and on weekends did jobs on their own for extremely reasonable rates so the deal was done. I was still in school and prior to my HVAC time so I had no idea if Cliff and his son were doing a good job on the install. Once it was done I was just happy to have AC without giant window 220 units and Dad was happy with the price.

Fast forward a few years and 9/11 happens and we all find ourselves in a period of national unity. Out of the blue I get a phone call from Cliff saying times were tough and could he "borrow" $1,000. New to my corporate job and making decent money and what a good deal we had gotten on the system I said "sure", and arranged to meet him at the bank. I gave him the money and truly thought it would not matter to me if it were a loan or a gift.

Several weeks later, Cliff called again asking for another $500. I hesitated this time but agreed for some unknown reason and again met him at the bank telling him this was it.

Not long after that at lunch I told my dad what I had done with Cliff. Now my father had worked his entire life as a banker and was the quintessential example of that. I could read his profound disappointment in me thinking his son was a complete rube and at the time I guess I couldn't blame him.

I made a few attempts to follow up with Cliff and call in my loan but, unsurprisingly, I was unable to find him and get repaid. Nobody in the neighborhood had seen nor heard of him in a long time.

Sadly, just a few years later my father passed away. It was very sudden and we were heartbroken. Many of his NY banker friends flew into town to pay their respects. On the day of the funeral I was walking down the street with the daughter of my father's best friend reminiscing about our dads and the past. All of a sudden the front door of the house we were walking past opened up and out walked Cliff! I stopped and said; "Cliff, nice to see you! You owe me $1,500!" LOL! My companion stood next to me with a wondering look on her face.

If there was ever anything that would convince me that there's an afterlife this was it. The hand of my father at work even after his passing. Needless to say, a week after the funeral Cliff paid me back $1,500.

Erin Holohan Haskell

Happy Halloween! 🎃

tim smith

Scariest was when a building manager called me about something odd going on with his apt. He said that his vinyl floor was very warm and the floor felt soft. I asked him where his apt was located, uh right above the boiler room. I had him look into boiler room and he said it was very hot in the room. I instructed him to not go in, don't touch anything and call the fire dept. I hopped in my van and headed up. When I got there the boiler was super heated, had the gas shut off at meter, every one vacated from the 50 or so units. The wall had caught fire due to the super heated steam main passing through the wall and too close to combustibles. This was a scary one. One of 3 runaways I have seen. Other 2 were water boilers if memory serves me.

rick in Alaska

I put in a new gas conversion burner on a residential boiler in a dark basement and had it up and doing my adjustments. I was having a hard time getting the numbers right, but luckily the boiler had been down a while, so kept running trying to get the house heat back up, which was giving me more time to do my adjustments. I was almost where I needed to be, when all of the sudden the boiler started percolating and rumbling hard. I looked at the gauge and it was at something like 170 degrees! I immediately panicked, pulled the power, and ran out of the basement. My heart was pounding.
I tried figuring out how I was going to cool this thing down, when I remembered it had a coil in it, so I turned on every faucet I could find. I let it run for a while before I figured it was not going to explode on me, and then went down to see what it was doing. It was cooling down pretty good by then, so I started troubleshooting how it happened. It took a little investigating, but I finally found the new four pin plug that was sent with the burner had the main hot, and the switched hot, wired backwards, which took the safety right out of the burner.
I did call the manufacturer and let them know in case there were more out there like that, but surprisingly he didn't seem very concerned. Seems like that should be something that should have been of great concern to them. Unfortunately, I don't remember what burner it was.
Rick

Teemok

As a young service tech, I was sent out to do a furnace cleaning on a old natural draft furnace under a farm house on hill side posts. I walked into the under-house space. It was tall and like a movie set with spider webs spanning between the duct work, pipes, wires and support beams. Like drapes of fine linen and lace everywhere, white with dust and webs. Being in these kinds of places a lot I just noted it and moved on to do my work. I did the full cleaning and had just checked the manifold gas pressure. I failed to replace the test port plug on the side of the gas valve before putting away the manometer. I noticed just after I place the jumper wire to test fire the furnace. The main valve opened and the burners lit as I reached to plug the hole with my finger. I watched the light and heard the flame pop and felt the heat propagate up the furnace as a spreading rolling flame front all over the underside of the floor, burning the mass of spider webs as it went. 4 to 5 seconds the flame traveled flashing here and there and then it went out 20 some feet away at far end of the space. I still had my finger on the port and the furnace burners were still lit. I pulled the jumpers and inspected everywhere I could for smoke or damage. I was spinning on the biggest adrenaline rush I'd ever had, pumping my spray tank of water and cleaner, spraying all suspects. Only very minor hair burn. One lucky kid. Lesson: Never take the manometer off without replacing the plug as one continuous uninterruptible task. Also, I don't see spider webs with the same kind of fear as most do. No one was home and I didn't tell anyone what happened. Someone at some point probably noticed that the furnace guy must have cleaned up all the spider webs.