# 2 How to reduce campfire smoke from a fire pit

have you ever noticed sitting around a campfire the smoke seems to always find out where you're sitting well today in Iowa I'm gonna show you how to get rid of that pesky smoke hi everybody about a year ago I built this fire pit and a friend explained a way for me to get fresh air into the bottom of the fire ring that allows the fire to burn a lot hotter and that eliminates that pesky smoke that seems to always find where you're sitting through pictures and some video I'm going to show you how we did that so the first thing we did was get the 1025 out took out the soil leveled it up put some granular fill in and compacted it painted a white line to indicate 14 feet that's the size we thought we wanted it we put some chairs out there sat in the chairs put the fire ring in the middle and really looked at the size a long time 14 feet allowed for about a five foot fire ring and then five feet in between the ring and the exterior wall next the frame was built I put a couple of bump outs that you can see there one is for the step Foundation and the other bump out was for the gas grill you can see the circle of where the fireplace is going to be so everything's in place and now this is where I'll show you how the pipe is installed so I want to point out before the re rod and the rock was put in place I put a four inch steel pipe in the ground that goes from the fire pit the bottom of the fire pit to daylight that'll all make more sense here in just a little bit so if you can look in the fire pit you'll see the steel pipe and then it runs out towards the top of your screen that's going underground disregard the drain tile that's laying there that has nothing to do with this pipe installation the I use steel pipe that first five or six feet because I was worried about the temperature then I went to a plastic pipe it was easier to install looking back I wish I would have went to a galvanized steel pipe in case this pipe rusts and swells up and cracks the concrete here's a picture of the concrete poured I used a stamped concrete it doesn't show very well but it's a grey brown mix to match some of the stone you can see the two ears that I put out one area there's for the grille and the other one is to set the first step stone on so everything would be equal height well here's a picture of the fire ring now installed it came as a kit the stones are all pre-cut to a certain radius and you come with a comes with the drawing you match the drawing to the stone circled around the end of the very nice fire ring we also started the wall to the left there you can see I was setting my elevation that's where I wanted the finished walls to all end up and then to the right you can see the green pipe that goes out to the side that's the vent pipe that I've been talking about well as you can see I added some landscape rock cut off the long pipe painted it brown to match the rock and I bought a small floor fan it's a multi-speed fan and it's gonna work very nice for here I'll take the cap off I positioned the fan up there I can turn it several different directions and different speeds to change the flow of air into the firepit depending how wet the wood is or what I would like to do so in this case I'm going to start the fire with some cardboard I'll turn that fan on and you'll see what's going to happen get the fire going well it's been 15 or 20 minutes of really going quite well something I wanted to also speak to was with the blower I realized this is a pretty big blower somebody told me to put a computer fans hype motor and put it right into the plastic tube but another way this is the slowest setting on it another way to slow it down a little bit is just turning angle of how much air is going in there the fans are real quiet that doesn't disrupt anything here so I can adjust it to blow more or less air on us and that works quite well also one last thing I wanted to show you this is out of sequence here the fire pit has the blower pushing fresh air into the pit is obvious okay now turn it off now I'm going to turn the blower off watch what happens it goes from that aggressive burn to a more lazy fire it depends out what the wood is and what you're trying to accomplish so it's a it's a great way to get a fire started blow a little air in there and keep the smoke down I'm very happy with it and it's less than a couple hundred dollars to do something like this to your fire pit that's all I have for today see you next time from today in Iowa [Music] you

Channel: Bill Burkhart

Views: 646,698

Rating: 4.6832538 out of 5

Keywords: Bill Burkhart, Firepit, firepit venting, campfire, Bill Burkhart 1025, Today in Iowa, Firepit ideas, Bill Burkhart 2038, John Deere 2038

Id: 7QW13Hw8WIQ

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2017