Slumber burning wood - not a good idea !

grahamc2003

muckybutt wrote: »

I can probably say from experience, that with you burning all that stuff on your fire you will have had a chimney fire you just wont have known about it.

It is surprising how many chimney fires I come across that the occupier doesnt know they have had.

There are basicall two types of chimney fire, the one that flashes over which by all accounts make a very loud roaring noise, then theres the low lying smouldering away ones.

Well, I suppose I might have had a chimney fire which I don't know about (that's a sort of obvious statement really), but I suppose I could the say that you might have had ten chimney fires that you don't know about.

A chimney fire in my chimney is almost an impossibility, because I always burn the stove hot, and produce almost no smoke. If there's no smoke going up there, then there's no soot up there (caused by deposition of smoke, that is components of the smoke going from gas to a solid), and there's no tar up there either (caused by components of smoke, including a high percentage of water, condensing - going from a gas to a liquid). I don't have a liner out of choice.

Anyone using a stove as an incinerator is making a big mistake, because they'll never reach the temperatures necessary to completely burn typical incinerator fuel (e.g. mixed household waste). Burning paper/cardboard is no probem in a hot stove, and neither are small quantities of dry chicken bones, which I feed in one or two at a time into a hot fire, then put the valuable ash onto my veg plot (the other fuel being mainly dry wood).