Hi, Warren Hartz here with some tips for heating your house with a wood stove or a fireplace.
To start with, if the glass doors on a fireplace or a stove get blackened with a layer of soot,
you lose the beauty of the fire and
also some of the radiant heat that you get through the glass doors.
A heavy layer of soot can be scraped off with a razor blade,
just wear gloves and be careful not to hurt yourself.
A light layer can be washed off, when the doors are cool, with a sponge or newspaper,
soapy water and ashes, or stove glass cleaner,
and wiped clean with a rag or paper towel.
Modern fireplace inserts and stoves have an air vent across the top of the glass,
Which creates an air wash over the inside of the glass, that keeps the glass from sooting up so fast.
If you don't have that, I did an experiment and found that by removing the gasket from the top of a door,
the glass stayed noticeably cleaner in just a few hours,
from the cool clean air descending over the inside of the glass.
You would lose a small amount of heated air from the room, through the crack and up the chimney,
but if you burn fires a lot you'll also be gaining heat through the cleaner glass.
While you're at it check the condition of the gaskets, and if they aren't sealing well
it's fairly easy to glue in a new gasket using stove gasket cement.
Be sure to get the right size gasket.
Every time you light a fire you'll need small to medium sized kindling to get it going well.
I keep a box of kindling split and ready to go.
I've many times split kindling directly on the hearth and try as I might not to,
I end up hitting the hatchet on the hearth, denting the hearth and dulling the hatchet.
So it's much better to split kindling on a block of wood,
and wearing gloves can save your hands from getting injured or getting slivers
If you bring the hatchet and the wood down together, it's easier to split exactly where you want, to avoid the risk of missing.
Splitting a piece off a block of wood, keep your fingers on the side of the block, not the top.
Keep an eye out for the chunks of cedar, fir, pine, redwood, tamarack, or other conifers
that have high pitch content for kindling.
A broken fro isn't much good for splitting shakes anymore, but it works great for splitting slabs of cedar for kindling.
Then you can hold the slabs together and split lots of small kindling pretty fast.
Split cedar also makes the room smell nice.
While matches work fine to light a fire,
a butane barbecue lighter is nice for getting the flame into where you want it,
and you can hold it on for as long as you need to to get the fire going.
As much as I'd rather burn up bank statements and other documents rather than recycling them, where they could get stolen
I found they don't really burn very well.
A test of even shredded documents versus crumpled newspaper showed that the newspaper clearly burns better for starting fires.
If your fire is having a hard time getting going, maybe the wood is damp or you didn't use enough kindling,
you can either use a bellows to blow more air, to give it more oxygen,
or keep some wax shavings on hand and put them on the wood to melt.
It's much safer than any flammable liquid. You can see the wax melting over the log here.
Just carve extra wax off of candles when it's warm and soft.
You can also make firestarter out of melted wax and egg cartons or other cardboard.
If your climate is at all damp like ours,
take advantage of the heat of the fire by building a drying rack above it.
In these rainy Cascade Mountains, towels get mildewy if they don't dry well.
I drilled holes in a 1 by 6 for the dowels, attached it with big screws to a stud in the wall,
and then painted the dowels with two coats of gloss polyurethane,
sanded between coats.
This end here hangs from a 2x4 screwed to the ceiling joist.
We use it every day to hang wet towels, gloves, coats, hats, floor mats, whatever.
Even if there's no fire, it's a good place to dry things.
Clear packing tape also works to keep the dowels dry and clean if you can get it on without wrinkles.
To manage your fire keep a pair of lined leather gloves nearby.
You can even pick up and move burning logs with them if you're quick.
Longer fireplace gloves are even better.
These are my favorite fireplace tongs. I can move wood even with one hand.
A poker can also be useful to pull logs forward.
These double hinged tongs pick up wood nicely, but take two hands to use.
To be safe keep a fire extinguisher nearby. A loud roaring noise and flames shooting out of the chimney means you have a chimney fire.
If shutting off the airflow doesn't stop it, put out the fire with the fire extinguisher,
shoot some in bursts up the chimney and quick close the doors.
If that doesn't work call the fire department.
If you get much smoke in the room, especially if your health is not great,
a HEPA air purifier removes smoke particles as well as dust and pollen from the air.
You may like the smell of wood smoke, but it's unhealthy to breathe very much of it.
We got this for $150 when the forest fire smoke here was really bad.
A cord of wood produces about 25 pounds of ashes, great for lawns, vegetable gardens, and fruit trees, especially apples.
It's about half as alkaline as lime, so don't put it on acid loving plants like blueberries.
I hope you got some valuable ideas from this video! Please subscribe to our channel for more videos to come on a wide variety of subjects.
Enjoy your wood heat!