The following was written by one of our customer’s for his blog – we have borrowed it! Thanks Jim!
Passing the Burnt Butterbean Test
By Jim Rhodes
Has this ever happened to you?
We were spending the weekend at our cabin on the river. My wife and I were enjoying an adult beverage before dinner, which was cooking on the stove. It was a lovely evening, and we decided to take the dog for a quick walk. The walk took a little longer than we had expected, and when we returned we found the house full of acrid black smoke, which originated from a saucepan on the stove, where the butterbeans had been simmering. The butterbeans had turned to crispy critters and the pan was clearly beyond salvation.
The house was full of smoke and reeked of burnt butterbeans. We threw open the doors and windows and turned on fans to disperse the smoke. After a few minutes, the smoke had cleared sufficiently for us to recognize each other’s facial features at ten paces.
But the smell? Ugh!
Fortunately, a few months earlier we had installed a new central air and heat pump system. Because of my wife’s allergies, we had also installed a Nautic Air NA20 air purifier at the same time.
I turned on the air conditioner and started closing all the doors and windows. My wife was aghast. “Why are you closing everything? The smell is awful.”
“Just let the system do its magic,” I replied.
She looked at me in that way the wives look at their husbands when they say something totally boneheaded. “Sure,” she said.
But, sure enough, within a few minutes, the burning smell began to dissipate, and by the time we sat down to dinner (sans butterbeans, unhappily), the odor was almost totally gone. By bedtime, the inside air was clean, fresh and clear.
“You were right,” she said.
I could not immediately remember the last time I heard those three words from my wife’s lips, but I just nodded and mumbled something about how smart we had been to install that wonderful air-cleaning machine.
A little later she smiled and said, “We were right.” With more conviction.
Full disclosure… The above is a shameless but unsolicited testimonial for a product made by one of my company’s occasional clients. Nonetheless, the story is true, and I will leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions. All I can say is that it passed the Burnt Butterbean Test.