Every fall season, the leaves start changing colours and the day becomes shorter and shorter. This is when people love to sit in front of the fire and turn their fireplaces on. Indeed, the tranquillity and peace that a fireplace brings is unmatched. However, the problem is that a big number of people do not employ good chimney practices. For instance, they do not reach out to chimney relining services until the damage becomes irreversible or a tragedy occurs.

In case you own a fireplace or a wood-burning stove, make sure that you are maintaining it properly before starting a fire. There are a number of reasons for this. According to a number of surveys, each year in the United States, there is a fire in about 26000 residential properties due to fireplaces or chimneys. This is primarily because many people are unaware with good chimney cleaning and health practices.

Good chimney practices

In order to help you out with this and to keep you safe, we include a number of chimney practices in this article. By employing these, you will be able to ensure safe working of your chimneys. These include:

Maintain the stove or fireplace

Make sure that you are cleaning your fireplace interior by vacuuming all the ashes up. However, while you are doing this, make sure that your hands and lungs are fully protected. In this regard, consider wearing gloves or a dust mask. Furthermore, while you are inside, remove all the soot build-up and creosote that you can see.

Though, in this regard, we recommend you to take help from a professional chimney cleaning service. Otherwise, you may end up missing something out that can start a fire later.

In order to look up in the flue, you can use a mirror coupled with a flashlight. This is a practice that we also recommend you to do in the heating season.

Hire chimney sweeping services

It is important for your chimneys to be inspected by a professional at least once in a year. So, whenever it is time to turn the fireplace on, make sure that you have called in a professional chimney cleaning service. This is because these companies are highly experienced at cleaning the creosote. Since creosote is primarily responsible for chimney fires, cleaning this substance away will reduce the risk of your house having a fire.

Use high quality wood

We cannot also stress enough on how important it is to use high quality wood to burn in your chimneys. Make sure that you are using a properly cured and split wood. This type of wood has the best performance. As a result of this, the build-up or soot and creosote in the chimneys is reduced significantly. Since these are the main components that start a chimney fire, using high quality food is a good practice. So you cannot just remove tree from your backyard and use as fireplace wood.

Know all the warning signs

It is also important to be fully aware of all the warning signs in your chimneys. These warning signs are the primarily reason why a fire may start in your house. By knowing when and if anything is wrong with your chimneys, you will be able to take steps before things go wrong.

Ending note

By using all the above mentioned chimney tips, you will be able to improve the working of your chimney and also keep your house safe from a chimney fire. At the same time, despite that, get your chimneys inspected by chimney sweep services Bowie at least once in a year. This way, you will be able to improve the condition of your chimney and prevent your house from a tragic event.