Kerosene Heater

To all my faithful blog readers: today, I have a story for you.  This particular story involves Adam, a kerosene heater, and myself.

When we first arrived in Japan, the weather was warm.  The weather was too warm in fact, it was scorching.  Logically, we weren't too concerned about the winter months and how cold it would become.  Before we knew it, winter came along and we decided to pull out the 10 year old kerosene heater and see if it still worked.  Many of the former AETs didn't use the heater having heard that you need to keep a window open because of the CO that is produced when the kerosene is burned.  Leaving a window open, just seemed like it would defeat the purpose.

Well, Adam and I weren't going to be deterred by some deadly CO gas and we got to work.  We bought a CO detector (off amazon of course) and kerosene.  Then on a warmer day where we could keep the windows open, we started 'er up.  A puff of dust came shooting out of the heater and a terrible smell.

We got back to work.  We researched how to maintain a kerosene heater and found out that you're supposed to replace the wick inside the heater every year.  Well, our heater was ten years old and we were sure that it had never been replaced, we figured that if we replaced the wick that would help with the smell.  We watched youtube videos of how to replace the wick.  Then, came the job of trying to purchase a wick.

I took pictures of the kanji for wick.  I took pictures of our kerosene heater and I went to two stores in town to ask if they sold them.  I really have no idea what happened at the first store- eventually with some "Arigatou gozaimasu" I managed to leave the two store personnel who were speaking to me.  At the second store the guy seemed to communicate to me that I didn't have the proper information about the kerosene heater by pointing to the make and model number on other heaters in the store.

That evening, I asked my boss where they usually get wicks for their kerosene heater (my boss kindly arranges to have kerosene delivered to our house whenever we need it).  They called a store in Ogaki and got the price for me and told me that I need to know the make and model to get the proper wick.

That night, I tried looking on amazon and online for what kind of wick our heater used.  I found a pdf manual for our heater and everything.  

The next day, I went back to the same store in Tarui with more pictures of kerosene wicks and with the make and model of our heater.  I went up to the same guy who probably wished he had looked busy.  I said my "sumimasen" (ie. excuse me) and then showed him my pictures.  He left me for a moment and came back with a flyer that showed some kerosene heater parts.  He seemed to be saying that they have wicks for this other brand of heater, but not for ours.  I was defeated.

I came back home and then it dawned on me, maybe the reason that no where sells wicks for this heater is because it actually doesn't have a wick.

I go back on the computer to verify if my hypothesis is correct and sure enough, not all kerosene heaters use wicks (at least, I hope so).  It all made sense.

In the midst of all this researching about wicks, I had also learned how to properly maintain a kerosene heater.  One of the things you need to do is clean the "oil" filter by running clean kerosene through it, or you might have to buy a new one.  This filter was actually one of the parts that it looked like they sold for our heater.  So I get my rubber gloves on and go and pull out this filter and clean all the hair and dust out of it.  I still can't get the kerosene to run through it that well though, so Adam decides to get a new filter.  At this point, I don't want to go back to the same store and "ask" about filters. So Adam takes the kerosene soaked filter in a plastic bag and goes off to the store.  I guess he tried to show it to a guy, who probably wasn't too interested in something dripping with kerosene.  He came home and ordered a filter on amazon.

The amazon guy comes a couple days later and we're all excited to finally use our heater.  Unfortunately, the filter was the wrong size.

In the end, we ended up taking off the front panel of the heater and vacuuming out ten years of dust (which is also when Adam confirmed that in fact there was no wick- probably should have done this first and would have saved us a good couple weeks of struggling).  We've been using the old filter and while it still does make a stink, we just leave the windows open.  The heater really does work really well and it can heat up our whole house fairly quickly.

That my friends, is the story of our kerosene heater and how difficult it can be to get information in a country where you don't speak the language.