How to Light a Wood-Burning Stove

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Mark Blocker and in this segment we're going to cover how to light a wood burning stove. To light a wood burning stove what you are going to need is some kindling. What the kindling is is just small cut up strips or split strips of wood and what it does is by having a lot of these pieces of smaller wood, they're smaller, they'll ignite easier and it also gives us more surface burning area to ignite. The way to get these lit, you are going to need a fire source for about a minute or two to actually light the kindling on fire to get your fire started and you can provide this with newspaper crunched up or a propane touch works well efficient as well. What I have done is I have scrunched up about four or five pieces of newspaper into balls and placed them inside the stove and now I am going to apply the kindling on there and we want to kind of spread the kindling out so it is spread out evenly on top of the newspaper and just pile as much of it up in there that you can get that you have room for. Remember to try and cross them around so you get a lot of spacing for the fire to come up between the kindling. Once you've got all your kindling in place all you'll need to do is light the paper with either a match or a torch. Prior to doing so make sure that your damper on your stove is in the open position so you'll get a good flow through. Once I light the fire I'll close the door and leave the door vented about an inch. This creates a real high velocity and it will create a good air flow flowing through to get the kindling going as fast as possible. So I am just going to light this using a torch. I am going to wait just a few seconds for the fire to get going, close the door down and leave it about an inch open. That will create a high velocity of air flow going through and get the fire started more quickly. That's how you start a wood burning stove."