Never Burn These Items in a Fireplace
It’s fireplace season right now in many areas, which (hopefully) means cozy evenings spent curled up in front of its warm glow. Or maybe you were cleaning up and stumbled upon a bunch of letters and gifts from your ex and felt that this warm glow beckons you for other, less pleasant reasons.
If you have a real wood burning fireplace, you need to feed it, but as it turns out, you can’t just stick in something made of wood (or other materials, for that matter) and put an end to it. In fact, according to Carol J. Alexander’s article in The Farmer’s Almanac , there is a whole list of wood and other items that should never go into a fireplace. Here’s what to keep away from this flame.
Wet, damp or untreated wood
In some cases, even what appears to be wood should not be heated in the fireplace. This is because, as Alexander explains, the wood must be properly seasoned, that is, it practically does not contain moisture.
And it’s not about bringing them overnight: the seasoning process takes at least a year. “You can recognize aged wood by its appearance — properly dried wood is gray, cracked or checkered, with loose or flaking bark,” she writes .
Even if the wood is properly seasoned, it should not be heated in the fireplace when it is wet or damp, so be sure to store the wood in a weather-protected place.
Treated, painted or treated wood
When you burn a piece of wood, you also burn everything on it, including chemicals used to treat or paint the wood, or adhesives that hold treated wood together, such as chipboard. As Alexander points out, you shouldn’t inhale the by-products of burning chemicals. For this reason, you should also avoid burning wood pallets as they are often treated with chemicals, she says.
Christmas trees (and other resinous tree)
Do you know that sticky substance on live Christmas trees? This is called resin (or sap), and trees containing this substance, such as pine, spruce and cedar, should also be kept out of the fireplace, says Alexander . Burning too much resinous wood can increase the amount of creosote in the chimney (which means you will need to clean it more often). It also causes fires to burst into flames, which can cause embers to fly outside your fireplace and burn someone nearby.
Printed, colored or coated paper products
According to Alexander , you can use a regular old black and white newspaper to start a fire, but paper products that have any inscriptions, colors or coatings on them should not get into the fireplace. Even if printed using soy ink, they likely contain pigments and other additives as well. The coating used to make thicker gift wrappers and direct mail flyers also doesn’t burn clean, Alexander said.
Plastics
Nobody has to tell you that you can’t burn anything made of plastic in the fireplace, but we’ll leave it here, just in case.