Types of Wood to Use in a Fireplace

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Bobby on behalf of Expert Village. In this series I am going to show you several different ways that you could easily light a fire within your fireplace and I am going to show you several safety techniques and things that you need to be aware of when lighting a fire in your house. There are several different types of firewood that you can burn in your fireplace. The main wood that you burn in your fireplace needs to be a hard wood. Hard wood will burn hot and will burn a long time whereas some of the softer woods will burn up real quick and the softer woods put out a lot of creosote which can collect inside your chimney and possibly cause a chimney fire. This is oak but you could have cherry, hickory or maple are all good firewoods. When you stack your firewood in there, you want to make sure and use probably at least three pieces of firewood. When you have three pieces, it stacks just right to have proper ventilation and locks the heat in so that the pieces will stay on fire. If you threw a big chunk of oak in there and it was just one piece and you tried to light on fire, more than likely it is not going to burn. It is going to end up going out because it does not have the proper ventilation and it didn't have other pieces around it so that heat could really build up and catch that big log on fire. "