After many cold winter months, spring has finally sprung! Now might be the perfect time to clean your stove you’ve been burning ruthlessly throughout winter. To get you started here are some helpful spring cleaning tips!

Tools

• Make sure you have the right tools for the job.
• Say NO to plastic, only use metal tools.
• Use a metal shovel and brush but only sweep when the ash is cold!
• Take care and wear thick gloves and use a metal bucket for ash.

Top tip; if you burn wood, it burns better with a little bit of ash left in the bottom so you don’t need to throw it all away.  Here are some more useful tips for what to do with leftover ash!

keeping the glass clean

• Use damp newspaper or a paper towel and dip it in wood ash. This will help clean the glass of your stove. Another way is to burn a few high-temperature fires before cleaning, make sure you are burning well dried well-seasoned wood.
• warm glass is easier to clean but make sure the glass is cool enough to touch!
• Cleaning the glass regularly will help with build up.
• Don’t spray water on to hot stove glass, as this could cause the glass to shatter or break.

Make sure you get your chimney and flue swept around once a year! Using Firemizer will help prevent lots of build up of creosote in your chimney or flue.

Air pollution

We can’t talk about cleaning without mentioning air pollution. Did you know that if you use Firemizer in your stove it reduces particulates and emissions by 72% and it works with Fire pits so you don’t need to stop enjoying the fire in this spring weather!

Safety

• This is a good time to check your fire and carbon monoxide alarms.
• Make sure you have a suitable fire extinguisher
• Always be careful when dealing with fire!

With all these cleaning tips you’ll have a lovely clean stove in no time!

These days it’s easy to get fire but how would you light one without matches, you may need to know how one day!

Using flint to start a fire has it’s advantages as it doesn’t matter if it gets wet as it won’t be ruined. 

What you’ll need!

Flint

A pocket knife [if your flint doesn’t have a scraping tool]

Kindling [ paper, cardboard, dry grass and small twigs] all work well

Sticks and larger logs once the fire gets going

Prepare the tinder nest

You want a nest of dry tinder the tiniest spark can be used to create flames. Use a knife to scrape thin wood shavings or alternatively gather dried grass, leaves or bark for a loose nest.

If you use dry grass you want to make a little bed for the flint shavings to go on. Put the bed on some smaller twigs and have other pieces ready to put on the fire.

Get in the zone

Take the flint and pocket knife, scrape some of the flints off one side, if you see sparks flip it over as you’re using the wrong side. You want to create some small flint shavings to go onto the bed of dry grass. A pile the size of a 5p is all you’ll need but you can add more if necessary. 

Relight the fire!

This time you’ll need to use the other side of the flint to create a spark. Hold it down next the bed at an angle so sparks will fall onto it. Take the scraper or pocket knife and scrape down the flint towards the bed. You should start to see sparks and if they don’t catch just keep scraping. Once you have a small flame going start to add some smaller twigs and continue to feed the fire. Don’t add too much too fast. The fire might go out!

Having problems

Is your kindling dry enough?

Is there’s too much wind getting to the embers?

Do you have enough flint shavings

If the fire starts but doesn’t keep going start blowing gently on the glowing pieces. 

Firebuilder can help your fires get going, a kindling and fire starter in one! No odour,  mess or chemicals!