Smokeless Fire Pit - Blue Sky Pellet Fire Pit

hey welcome to another episode of camping camera have you ever heard the saying where there's smoke there's fire well not today hey welcome back to the channel everyone if you've been here before welcome back and if you're new thanks for joining um i'm not big on doing unboxing videos but today i'm going to make an exception we have the blue sky wood pellet fire pit i saw this being used in front of a hardware store kind of as a demo model a few weeks ago and didn't even know that this was a thing i've seen fire pits that you use you know regular firewood in but i didn't know they had one for wood pellets a lot of advantages that we'll cover in a minute um so the first thing i did was i got home i looked them up read some reviews about them looked at different brands but i decided to buy one for my birthday [Music] so what are wood pellets well i've got some that i poured out of the bag into an old pretzel jar basically wood pellets are just that it's compressed wood in a pellet form some people call it biomass but really it's just it's just wood fiber oftentimes it's the scraps that's left over from when you rip lumber in a sawmill or or process lumber into furniture what not in a manufacturing plant and it's just pure wood so why even use wood pellets in the first place i mean is it firewood readily available well yeah it is but things are different than they used to be state parks and national parks those are the places that i find myself camping most often and when i go there i usually see signs and even when i make reservations i see notices on the internet saying that you're not allowed to bring firewood in anymore you have to acquire it or purchase it from a local heat treated source and usually what that means is that you have to stop at the convenience store down the road and you have to buy a little bundle of firewoods like five pieces for eight or nine dollars that has a certificate on it saying that it was heat treated yeah well i'm not that guy i'm not gonna do that at all so wood pellets are something that you can bring with you and take them anywhere you want to go another thing is that for somebody like me with allergies the claim on this is that it produces very very little almost no smoke and if that turns out to be the case i should be able to breathe a lot easier usually when i have a campfire i hop in the teardrop camp or go to bed my nose is stopped up all night and i'm just coughing and hacking so hopefully this will relieve some of those symptoms so let's get this dude out of the box um like i say i had a birthday a few days ago and i've been waiting for the right moment to come out here to the shop and open this thing up and i have not opened it we'll look at this thing for the first time together all right so here's the pit so this bottom piece i know this one just looking at reviews on the internet this is the base or the pedestal that it sits on here's some instructions um i think this is a carrying bag just so you can transport it and not get a lot of stuff dirty well it's kind of nice it says blue sky they actually have that uh relief cut in there and it has uh three kind of a tripod configuration feed on it which is good so if you're on unlevel ground you know it shouldn't be uh wobbling or rocking it's actually i don't know it's actually kind of sturdy filled all right so let's pull the top of it out [Music] now again this is the more affordable option that i saw for sale i purchased this one from amazon um but the reviews i read were i mean they were like identical said that they did the same thing they work the same way so i'll try to get some video some close-up video of just the inside of this thing where you can see but basically there's a screen in the bottom here it has some holes that are about an eighth of an inch um and you just dump your pellets in there and you have some some holes around the the lip right here um that i think air comes through and it's like a secondary combustion process that's supposed to like reburn the smoke off the fire now when i was researching this myself before i bought it i did watch a couple other videos and i appreciate you guys making those um but one thing i'm going to be brutally honest that you forgot to show is the bottom of the fire pit you always showed the side and the top and i wanted to see how well does this thing sit on the base well i'm showing you the bottom of it and what i see here is a little lip or ring all around the perimeter of the base of this thing which should help center it on the actual base of the fire pit so let's just see if it does yeah it helps to center it and it provides a flange to keep the top from sliding off that's one thing i didn't know i was hoping that it had something like that and yeah sure enough it does so let's see how big this dude is [Music] from one flat side to the other flat side on the outside 15 inches looks like it's about 11 and three quarters to well no it's 12 inches on the inside the chamber is 12 inches on the inside six and a half inches deep to the bottom where your pellets sit the overall height is 12 and 5 8. the way i've got it nested together here and again talking about nesting the bottom will nest in the top yeah look at that so when it comes time to transport it the height now goes to seven inches so that's pretty good so you're looking at a um a seven inch by 15 inch thing to have to throw in the back of the vehicle that's not bad at all usually when i buy a product that has a bag or carrying case it just barely fits and you have to like put grease on to get it to go together let's see if this is the same deal i hope not now it actually goes together pretty well it's got a drawstring yeah good now for me personally let's see if i can put my pellets in here and put everything in one spot i hope i can that's money right there so i've got the base i've got the top i've got my wood pellets all in the bag now the bag i'm sure is not going to completely close on everything but look at that i can still carry it all heck yeah so the portability looks good i'm real happy with that but there is one thing i forgot um and that's the ignition source one of the good things about wood pellets is that they are condensed and from what i understand they burn a long time they do in my smoker grill but the other thing is they're kind of hard to light because they are so condensed so i ended up buying some fire starter cubes now i haven't used these we're going to use them here in a little bit and see how they do but my goal is to just drop some of these in a ziploc bag and either throw them in the same container with my pellets or just drop them down here in the grill that way it's all together and i'm hoping that i can light a couple three of these things and then they will catch the pellets on fire so let's get this thing out and use it [Music] do [Music] we've got the fire starting cubes um in the pellets i'm hoping that'll get the pellets going and then here in a few minutes it should be uh should be burning good we'll see how much smoke it produces the claim is it's minimal to none um hard for me to believe none but let's hope that you know that's what it turns out to be so you can see the pellets are starting to burn around the fire starting cube so we'll get too close don't want to hurt the phone so we're sitting here on a little bench in front of the fire and we can feel heat but i don't smell smoke no i don't spill a bit of smoke so so far so good i don't know how to describe it except to say it smells like heat from a heater but not smoke but not smoke good no okay so we've noticed that it almost looks like the flames are coming out of those little holes at the top now yeah and the fire you say there's some kind of a it's almost almost has like a spiral tornado type yeah it's almost like it's spinning inside the burn chamber but hey this thing is actually putting out a fair amount of heat and we're what two feet maybe three feet from it and i'm not smelling any smoke no still i can smell like a heat like you say like a heat smell uh very faint but no real smoke i'm really surprised by that and we're thinking that maybe the heat smell is the paint yeah this is the first time so it could be the paint you know just getting hot the very first time but that's pretty cool looking like the um the fire is almost like it's coming out of those holes so as i understand the holes are supposed to inject oxygen into the burn chamber and maybe either re-burn the smoke or make the fire burn hotter and just watching it it does seem to be doing that so we've had a chance now to burn it for about 35 minutes we put new pellets on there and when we did we saw some smoke inside the burn chamber and just a little bit came out of the you know the actual unit but not much and you know after about two more minutes now it just went back to pure flame and heat um and actually we're getting ready to have to move because it's getting pretty hot here that's actually too hot oh yeah but i would say this is a success and i'm actually glad i bought it it was about 80 bucks plus tax but i'm really happy with this and i look forward to using it on the camping trip so now here's the irony this fire pit is supposed to be virtually smokeless but here's what happens if you try to throw more pellets on it after it's already went out to hot coals there's no flame it will smoke like a son of a gun so be sure if you have one of these things if you're going to put more pellets on it that you do it while there's still flame so what just happened all i heard was a whoosh a loud one i turned around and bam the fire's back is it still smoking no the ghost is gone out of it so if you put pellets on there after the flame is gone and you just have hot coals and that's it it's going to not only smoke it's going to smoke like a son of a gun but when the heat builds up enough and it goes back to fire it goes and it goes all at once and then the smoke is gone i'm instantly gone so it's either zero smoke or like the biggest smoke plume you've ever seen a freight train a freight train a steam train all right so we're back in the workshop what do we think about the blue sky pellet fire pit well i'll have to say i'm glad i got it and i look forward to using it it was about 80 bucks off of amazon and the amazon reviews were spot on the folks on there said that it'll run 30 45 minutes and then you'll need to put more pellets on but be careful when you do because if you don't do it right you could cause a lot of smoke oh my gosh they were they were so right not only did this smokeless fire pit cause smoke oh man it it smoked up my whole front yard i mean there was a plume of smoke coming off this thing but it was my fault what i found is that i added the pellets after the fire had already died down to coals instead of adding them when the fire was still rolling and really hot so i went back later and i tried just that while the flames were still a couple feet high i went ahead and i dumped some right in the middle and there was no problem there was some smoke inside the fire chamber but not much coming out so yeah there's a learning curve and i'd say if you get one of these i highly recommend trying it before you ever go to a campground around other people or you'll end up smoking these folks out till you learn how to use it so as far as pellet usage um you saw that i had this jug filled to right about here this is an hour and a half worth of pellet burn um i don't know probably probably 10 pounds and most bags of pellets are either 20 pounds or 40 pound bags so yeah you can get a few hours of burn out of a good 40 pound bag of pellets so i think it will be inexpensive to operate and pretty handy just as long as you add the pellets before the fire goes out so i hope you enjoyed this episode if you did give me a thumbs up hit the subscribe button if you want to come back and until next time take care we'll see you on the road [Music] you

Channel: Camp and Camera

Views: 68,436

Keywords: Teardrop camper, teardrop trailer, diy teardrop, teardrop build, rv, travel trailer, camp, camping, campground, how to, build, make, construct, homemade, galley, diy teardrop campers community, Squaredrop, toy hauler, micro camper, tiny camper, diy camper, blue sky fire pit, flame genie, pellet fire pit, campfire, smokeless campfire, How to make a campfire, Best Fire pit

Id: v83Fa_nHCJg

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021