Tips for Heating Your House with a Fireplace or Wood Burning Stove

Tips for 0:08 keeping fireplace glass doors clean for beauty and heat, 1:23 replacing fireplace or stove door gaskets, 1:39 best types of wood for kindling, 3:34 getting a slow fire cooking with wax or a bellows, 4:18 building a drying rack, 5:14 fireplace gloves, tongs, poker, fire extinguisher, 6:06 air purifier, 5:46 putting out a chimney fire, and 6:26 adding wood ashes to your garden.
Based on 35 years of experience heating our house with wood.

A quality bellows is an easy way to get a fire going fast: https://amzn.to/2tHCnp1
It's wise to have a fire extinguisher in your house: https://amzn.to/2U8ov1V
Keep a Chimfex on hand, designed specifically to put out chimney fires: https://amzn.to/2RM7NCu
Recorded with a Sony FDRAX53 Camcorder, which I highly recommend: https://amzn.to/2WG2oCo
The audio was recorded with a Tascam DR-40 Digital Recorder: https://amzn.to/31sGJMx
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How to Keep Glass Doors Clean: At 0:47 I remove the top gasket on the right door, and you can see how much cleaner the right glass is from the left as a result. Newer inserts and stoves have a vent built in for that, which you can open when you have a fire, close it otherwise.

Replacing the Door Gasket: A Stove Gasket Kit or separate Gasket and Stove Gasket Cement can be bought at most hardware stores or online. See if yours are compressed and leaking. Pull or scrape it out and measure the size for replacement. Follow the directions on the glue.

Types of Firewood: For kindling, oily woods like cedar, redwood, tamarack, pine or fir catch easy and burn quick. Look for chunks of tight straight grain wood that's easy to split. For your main firewood, deciduous hardwoods are best. I use alder, maple and cherry, dense wood like vine maple or oak are even better. Knots and branches are dense and burn a long time. Wet woods like cottonwood take 2 years to dry and then have little heat value.

Using Ashes in the Garden: Great for lawns, fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Wood ash is about half as alkaline as dolomite lime, so use twice as much to raise the Ph. Don't put ashes on acid loving plants like blueberries and azaleas, and not on raspberries, strawberries, tomatoes, or potatoes, unless your soil is very acid to start with. Ash adds valuable minerals - mostly Potassium, also phosphorus, calcium and boron. Especially good for apple trees.

About Chimney Fires: Burning a consistently hot fire with dry hardwood will help keep your flue clean. The only chimney fire I ever had was from burning cardboard boxes, which create a lot of flames. Don't do that. It went out when I closed the doors and shut off the air supply. Keep a fire extinguisher handy, and better yet, there's a Chemical Fire Extinguisher you can buy and throw in the fire that will quickly use up all the oxygen and the fire should go out. If necessary call 911. Get your chimney cleaned if it needs it.

Also, see these videos:
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A rack for cutting branches and small wood:    • Easy Kindling & Small Firewood Cuttin...  
2 hours of a crackling fire with time lapse at the end:    • Real Crackling Fire, 2 Hours Cozy Rom...