A wood stove provides your home with warmth and coziness especially during the cold months of the year. Since you use wood in the unit, creosote and soot tend to build up fast inside it which puts your property at the risk of fire.
For you to keep your family safe, you need to undertake regular chimney cleaning. You can do the cleaning by yourself or hire chimney cleaning services providers to help you out. For you to properly clean the unit, you need to follow a set of steps. These steps include:
Ensure it’s cold
Remember that you will be elbows deep in ashes when you are cleaning the unit. Since you don’t want to get burned, you should ensure that the stove is cold enough before you start the work. For you to tell whether the unit is ripe for cleaning, you only need to touch it. You should be able to touch the unit with your bare hands and not get burned at all.
Clean the firebox
The firebox is one of the most important parts of the stove thus you should pay a lot of attention to it. The firebox is the part of the wood stove where you load the wood for you to have the fire.
For you to clean it you need an ash bucket then using a shovel from the fire set, scoop all of the old ashes. You should remove as much of the ash as possible.
The best way of telling that you have properly cleaned the unit is cleaning it until you see the brick inside the stove. During the cleaning, remember to inspect the condition of the stove. Are there loose bricks? Are the bricks cracked? You need to take a look at this. If you notice any problem, fix it as soon as possible.
Pay attention to the ash box
The ash box is located at the bottom of the wood stove. The ash box is simply a little slide out drawer that catches the overflow of ashes from the wood box. The unit gives the ashes a place to go to cool off.
Just like other parts of the wood stove, you need to clean the ash box. This is to give room for more ash that the unit might be producing. The cool thing is that it’s easy to clean the box as all you need to do is to pull the drawer and dump the contents.
Clean the outdoor unit
You shouldn’t only focus on the insides of the wood stove. You also need to think about the outside of the unit. Since the outdoor unit is on the roof, you will need a ladder to clean it. Plenty of accidents have been reported as people are getting on the roof; therefore, you should be cautious when doing it.
The best way of going about it is having someone to hold the ladder for you. For you to clean the outdoor unit you need to pull off the cap, then, using a wire chimney brush, get rid of all the soot on the insides of the unit. By doing this you will get rid of all the creosote that might have built up inside the unit.
The broken up creosote gets into the chimney stove where you can clean it or let it burn.
Pay attention to the spark box vent
Does your chimney have an attached spark box? You should clean it. The function of the spark box is to keep the fire sparks from flying up through the chimney and landing on the roof thus putting your house at the risk of catching fire.
Due to the regular use of wood, it’s common for the spark box to clog up with creosote when you go for a long time without cleaning it. The best way of cleaning it is using a chimney wire brush and rub it on the outside.
When you do this you will break up any residues that might be clogging up the vent holes. Chimney repair experts report that when the vent holes are clear, fire is able to draw air better thus the fire burns better with little or no smoke. As a consequence, little soot is deposited thus you don’t have to regularly hire a chimney sweep Columbia MD to help you with the cleaning.
