Five Reasons Your Fireplace May Not Work Properly

From time to time, we all make stupid mistakes. We’re human. Often, we tend to make mistakes particularly when we’re doing something that we don’t do on a regular basis – such as using the Fireplace
. The following mistakes are five common sense things that we might overlook the first time we build a fire during the winter.

Mistake One: Not using dry firewood! If you’re trying to burn freshly cut firewood, or if your firewood supply has been rained or snowed on, it’s not going to burn as well as dry firewood. Additionally, once wet wood finally starts to burn, it will produce more smoke, which in turn means there’s less oxygen for the fire to get going.

Mistake Two: Not opening the damper completely! Almost everyone has a story of forgetting to open the damper, or not opening it all the way. Don’t feel about this. In fact, a lot of the time the damper won’t open all the way because the chimney hasn’t been cleaned recently (after all, how often do we think about hiring a chimney sweep?).

Mistake Three: Having a dirty Chimney
! Besides affecting how completely you can open your damper, a dirty chimney dramatically alters the way your chimney performs. If your chimney doesn’t have a cap (the wire grate at the top), animals and all sorts of debris can make its way into your chimney. Additionally, even just the build up from multiple fires (or worse, multiple years of fires) means that the flow of air in your fireplace won’t function as it should.

Mistake Four: Was the chimney designed correctly? Unless you built your home, you don’t have as much control over this mistake as the others. A common problem of fireplaces is that the flue is not the right size. If it is too small, it won’t be able to vent efficiently – leaving you with an unpleasant extra amount of smoke in your home. By reducing the size of the hearth (by adding extra bricks or some other method) you can help correct for this problem.

Mistake Five: Was your chimney built correctly? Unfortunately, it’s possible to mess up the construction of a chimney in more than one way. A chimney has to be a certain height in order to function properly, and thus, if it was built too short you’re going to face a couple of problems: you can either keep it as is, and just deal with the extra smoke; you can hire a mason to make it taller; or you can install a gas fireplace insert and use the chimney to hide the vent pipe(s) for the fireplace insert.