How to Make Fire Wood by Compacting Materials Together

Burn homemade logs in your fireplace.

If you are throwing out old newspapers, sawdust sweepings and coffee grounds and buying or cutting firewood, you can save money and the environment by recycling your trash. Make your own fire logs for your wood stove or fireplace. You can make these in the summer when it's warm out. It's simple to do, and the kids can help.

Things You'll Need

• Newspaper
• Sawdust or coffee grounds (optional)
• Old towel or t-shirt
• String
• Heavy paving blocks

Instructions

1. Soak a newspaper in water and squeeze out the excess.

2. Roll the newspaper tight into either a log or a ball. Make several if you like. You can add sawdust, coffee grounds or other flammable, nontoxic materials. Your fire will burn longer if there is some sawdust in the log. If there are a lot of extras in your log, you can help bind them together with melted wax candles or paraffin.

3. Wrap the log or ball in an old towel or old t-shirt and twist the ends to hold the newspaper tight. Secure with a string.

4. Place the ball or log on a hard surface like cement, and weight it down with something heavy and flat like a paving slab. Leave it for at least an hour.

5. Unwrap the log or ball, and set it out to dry, out of the weather. It will need to dry for at least 2 or 3 months (which is a lot less time that green wood takes to dry).

Tips & Warnings

• You can add magazines and junk mail to your logs, but the inks normally used on these can sometimes cause smelly fumes. These would be good to burn outside in a campfire but not inside your home.

References

• Making Newspaper Fire Logs

Resources

• Instructables: How to make newspaper logs (video)