How To Start A Fire And Smoke Free In A Traditional Fireplace Using Firewood

hey guys welcome back to another video so it's uh october 26 and and it's been getting pretty cold here in west in maryland and so what we decided to do is it finally got cold enough that it's it's time for a fire so it's gonna be our first fire for the year and so we're in the process of getting an insert but we're not going to wait because it's cold so what we'll do is we're just going to show you today the way that we go about fight if starting a fire uh normally we know you could go in and clean this a little bit much a little bit out better but there's no real need to because it's not gonna be enough ash to uh cause any problems so anyway so what we do is we get junk mail we we typically will save it and we do it intentionally just so that way we can get some crumpled paper down at the bottom to start our our kindling up and get our fire going a little bit better so i take it i find wadding it like this is better than rolling it and you definitely don't want to just throw it in their stacks because then it will allow air to come in chop down foreign so we got rid of a couple of bushes and uh we kept all of the bushes to use for this type of kindling and so it's this stuff is not completely dried out yet but it will still definitely do the job all right so set this stuff right on top and then the next step will be to get some of the bigger firewood to go on top of that [Music] um okay okay so the one thing that you do want to definitely make sure that when you're stacking the wood in there you have to consider that as this kindling the small stuff burns down the wood's going to start to collapse in on itself so you never want to stack wood that when it settles it falls this way you always want to make it to where it's going to fall in towards the fireplace or at the very least sideways you never want it to fall forward okay so now that those are there the last thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that our dampener is open so when you have what the what goes up your chimney is called your flue okay and typically the especially these old fireplaces they have a handle some of the handles are on the inside some of the handles are on the outside and so what will happen is if you have this handle right here which is controlling the dampener and basically all it's doing is it's closing or opening the flue the stack that goes out through the chimney so when you first are ready to start your fire you want to make sure that your your dampener is all the way open because you want air to be able to flow out if you don't the smoke is going to just immediately start backfilling directly into your house now the next thing you want to make sure is especially if it's cold out cold air is heavier than hot air so the chimney right now is filled with a bunch of cold air so you need to get that cold air out and otherwise the cold air will act as a cap and it will force all the smoke into your house so the way that you go about doing that is why we left this one piece of paper up so we're going to use that paper so we're going to use this paper to heat up the flue so we'll just basically roll this into kind of a funnel esque shape and then we're going to light this end on fire stick it up the flue as high as we can and when it burns down to about here the flu should be nice and warm and since we have it so high up the the smoke is not going to be able to come back down so it's going to force its way up as it's heating up the flu it gets down then we'll take use this to actually light the rest of the fire so we just get that going and then we'll stick it up into the okay and that's pretty good so we'll bring it down and then just shove it down okay put it out but that's okay so we'll shove it down with normally the rest of the paper in this case since i accidentally smothered it we'll have to light the paper back up but that's okay oh now so at this point you can see the fire really is is going uh so you can if you have this type of setup you can close your your your ash guard or your spark guard basically it's up to you i if i'm going to be in the room until it gets really really going i typically will leave this open just a way i can make adjustments as i need to and with even though you wouldn't think it because this is an open grate this actually blocks a lot of the heat that the fire produces and so once the fire is really going if i'm going to be in here like i said i typically will leave this open just to allow that heat to come in and just keep an eye on it to make sure that sparks and stuff don't funnier fly out of the fireplace so definitely you never ever want to do anything unsafe with the fire you'd never want to set yourself up to have any kind of uh you know incident so you know just be be safe be responsible and don't do anything that would not be uh good for your for your safety or for the safety of your home i want to mention too is so once the fire really gets going and you have a decent bed of coals again all most of the heat is going to go out the chimney so one of the ways that you will help not lose a lot of heat is that same dampener starts to get closed now you don't want to close it all the way because if you do then the smoke has nowhere to go so where is it going to go out the front and into your house so you want to close it about 50 to 60 percent and you're gonna learn your your fireplaces and which is a good amount to close it so because what that's going to do is that's going to help slow down how fast the wood is burning and that's going to create a barrier instead of in the front is going to create a barrier towards the top help for help returning the heat back into the firebox and then out into the room so once we get everything going really really good like i said well when then have a nice hot bed of coals you don't have to worry about your fire going out we'll close the dampener about 50 to 60 percent of the way and then that way that'll help force all that heat out all right guys all right so like i said that's how we start a fire i'm sure there's lots of other really good methods out there as well but if you enjoy this video please consider subscribing to our channel please if uh smash that like button for us to help support our channel and post comments because that's another way that you can help support our channel and and help it grow so um as always thank you again thank you for your support don't forget to like share and subscribe you

Channel: Rural Life With The Ross'. Khmer USA Family Vlog

Views: 112,516

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Id: B0WxdhZT-KM

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020