Safety Concerns When Cleaning a Fireplace

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Bobby here on behalf of Expert Village. Everyone loves having a warm fireplace on a cold winter day. The downside to this is you have to clean your fireplace. In this series we are going to show you how to clean the inside of your fireplace, you chimney and even repaint the inside of your fireplace to make it look new. Okay so now I've draped plastic down on the bottom of my fireplace and I am almost ready to move the ashes out of the fireplace and you can see there is quite a few ashes in there. But one thing I need to think about first is even if I burned a fire the night before, some of those coals will be hot. If I were to take those coals and throw them in a plastic bag or box, there is a chance that those would catch on fire. So to make sure you give it plenty of time, you probably want to investigate the fire with a shovel a little bit and make sure that all the coals are completely out, hold your hand in there a little bit. Don't touch anything but just hold your hands in there a little bit to see if you feel any heat and make sure that the fire is completely out. Sometimes even 12 to 24 hours after you have burned the fire, you can still have hot coals so that is something that you need to think about. "