The insufficient draw on your chimney’s fireplace leads to a lot of issues when you have a fire on, which includes the fire going out after it has been started. It produces more smoke than usual, or you find it harder to maintain your fire.

Each fireplace is different. The fireplace’s size, chimney height, flue diameter, and other factors are all factors to how well the chimney draws.

You want your chimney to be more efficient, especially in the winter. Nothing is better than sitting in front of the fireplace with hot cocoa. While fireplaces are a great source of warmth in the colder months, if they are not maintained properly, they cause heat loss in your space. You would have to call chimney contractors for cleaning.

Read on.

Have Your Chimney Swept

In case you have not had your chimney swept within the past year, then you should have your chimney cleaned so it operates efficiently.

It is recommended that your chimney must be swept once a year, which is ideal before the burning season. However, you might have to you clean it more often than yearly if you burn wood often in your fireplace the entire year.

Burn Low Moisture Wood

The secret to fast and hot fire is to burn wood that has moisture of 20% or lower. Wood with high moisture burns slowly and loses most of the wood efficiency. Basically, the fire boils off excess moisture before the wood becomes fully combustible. Wood moisture is going to make the top-down fire-starting method very difficult.

If you want your wood to have low moisture content, you should stack it properly and store the wood. Similar to a building fire, the wood must be loosely stacked so that air can move around the wood. The wood has to be stacked outside and covered so no driving rain is going to hit the wood. This is going to allow the wind to move through the wood and then dry it out. Do not cover the wood with a tarp because it can trap the moisture in the pile, which causes condensation formation.

Keep the Damper Close

Your fireplace damper should always be closed unless there is a fire burning. You can easily forget to close the fire after it has burned out, but it keeping the damper open causes drafts and heat loss in other parts of the house. You need to be careful because you might open it when you start a fire.

Open Air Vents or Windows

If you want the chimney to draw well on your fireplace, the hot air gets lost up your chimney and it needs to be replaced by other air from inside your home. You can create a vacuum and a fire in your fireplace can start burning inefficiently in case the air that gets lost in the chimney is not replaced or quick enough.

The vacuum created is more of a problem in the newer homes, where they are made to reach higher standards and less air will make its way into the house.

Opening external air vents in the same room while you open your fireplace is going to help supply a fire with a lot of fresh air.

In case your home does not have an external air vent, you can slightly crack open the window, ideally, one that is in the same room.

Provide Enough Air to Replace Lost

The main component of burning wood is fresh air and oxygen. If there is more fresh air, the hotter the fire will be.

This post first appeared on https://www.firstclasschimneyservices.com