Lighting Your Fire

The main rule to remember when lighting a fire is to always start small and work your way up to a larger fire.

We recommend starting a fire with a good handful of kindling placed on top of firelighters or a good amount of paper and criss cross the kindling up to build a tower, the more kindling you use, the hotter the ignition point and the easier the fire will start.

Once the kindling is burning well then place a couple of small logs on top of the kindling, once this is alight then place further logs on the fire and sit back, relax and enjoy.

Something that we always do once the fire is alight in our stove, is to burn the fire hot and fast with the bottom damper full open and the main door shut for a minimum of 20 minutes, this helps to clean the glass after the fire has been shut down from the burn before and helps to clean out the soot up the chimney.

We also start the fire on softwood, this ignites quicker than hardwood, gives off more heat, and gets the heat into the room much quicker. We also get the crackling effect too which visitors love to hear and nice big flames, which they love to see.

Wood Ash

Wood ash from your fire once cooled is a very good addition to your garden as the potash helps to promote better flowers and fruit of your plants, and a necessity if growing onions.

Please do not add this to your garden if you burn coal or mix it with the wood. Coal ash will not do your garden any favours.

Sweeping Chimneys

This is an annual and essential job.

The last thing anyone wants is a blocked chimney either by soot, old bird nests after the summer, broken bricks in old chimneys and believe it or not some customers have had dead animals in their chimneys.

We never get much more than a carrier bag full of soot out of ours, and this too is sparingly spread around the garden.

We are quite often asked if we can recommend a chimney sweep, well we can reccommend 2

Decorative Heating  02920 811478
F A Farmer             02920566068  Alan also supplies, what we belive to be the best coal around

both are friendly and helpful, and most of my customers have nothing but good things to say about them, we would'nt reccommend them otherwise!!