Fireplace Cedar Rapids

Critical Fireplace Maintenance Tips

Your fireplace in Cedar Rapids, Iowa needs to go through a variety of maintenance steps to ensure that it runs smoothly and efficiently. Thankfully, some of these tips you can do on your own to keep it as secure and protected as possible. However, you may also want to get professional help for some of these techniques because they may be beyond your skills as an amateur and a homeowner.

Clean Out the Interior

The interior of your fireplace is going to contain a large amount of debris caused by burning wood. This debris includes dirt, dust, ash, wood chips, creosote, and much more. As a result, you need to take the time to properly clean out the interior to ensure that your unit runs smoothly. Ignoring this process is a bad idea because you may let problems that you could have easily fixed become worse and trigger complications with your unit that may affect how well it operates.

Even worse, these fine particles can cause a growth of various items in your unit, such as mold and fungus, and may go airborne if you aren’t careful. When this happens, people in your home are going to suffer from diseases such as allergies, asthma attacks, and even worse. Therefore, you need to be very careful when you clean the interior and use the proper cleaning methods – and protection – to keep yourself safe.

If you don’t feel comfortable performing this step on your own, you may want to contact a professional to get help instead. These experts will fully understand how to clean out your interior without causing any problems. They will wear masks to prevent inhalation, use air filters to catch any airborne dust, and even lay down sheets to protect the area around the interior to keep it safe from becoming dirty.

Add a Blower

If you don’t have an air blower in your fireplace, you are doing yourself a grave disservice. These blowers help to circulate air through your system and improve its airflow. This benefit is huge because it can help your unit run more smoothly and increase the level of heat it produces. These flowers typically install quite easily and require very little maintenance to keep them running.

Air blowers also help avoid dangers by keeping the fire from leaving your unit and spreading dangerously. Even better, a suitable air blower can provide your heater with a little relief by decreasing how much power it needs to run. As a result, your heater is less likely to run into operational problems and will run more efficiently as the years pass, providing you many benefits.

Should you contact a professional to help you here? That depends on your comfort working with your unit and various electrical outlets. A typical fan blower will need to hook up to your home’s electrical system in a streamlined and straightforward way. Just as importantly, the unit needs to be pointed in the proper direction and set at the right speed and strength to keep it operating effectively.

Consider Heat-proof Glass Doors

fireplace maintenance isn’t always about simple repairs but may include upgrades that keep your unit running smoothly. For example, heat-proof glass doors can help to make your unit more efficient and provide a myriad of other benefits. For example, these doors will help to decrease the risk of injury by making it harder to get to the fire. They will also protect against spilling embers getting into your home and causing fires that could put your family and your house at serious risk.

Just as importantly, a glass door can trap heat inside of your heating unit and ensure that it runs more smoothly. This benefit is particularly important if you have items near the heater that could be affected by heat. Glass doors also ensure that people don’t get uncomfortable sitting in your home because the temperature will be captured and redirected in a way that ensures it doesn’t spread too rapidly in your home or cause other complications that could put your family at risk.

When installing these heat-proof glass doors on your heater front, make sure that you properly replace the previous door and remove all hinges and other elements that were paired with these doors. If you don’t feel comfortable performing these steps, as always, contact a professional. They can remove your old door and install the new one in a way that will ensure it works smoothly. Just as importantly, they can maintain the door over the years to make sure that it works properly.

Smoke Management Techniques

If you see smoke coming into your home from your fireplace, you need to put out the fire right away and inspect the unit to see what is wrong. Smoke entering a home is typically an issue that occurs for a variety of reasons, many of them related to how well you keep your heater maintained.

For example, you may have a filthy chimney that needs to be scrubbed right away to prevent smoke inhalation. This process is particularly important because a dirty chimney can be dangerous if excessive soot or creosote is on the interior of the chimney, ready to catch fire.

You may even be burning wood improperly, which is a common mistake. For example, you need to find woods like oak, birch, and ash to ensure that they burn smoothly and more cleanly. These woods also produce less soot and creosote, which is a massive benefit for you in this situation.

Finding Professional Help

So if you need a fireplace in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and you want the best professional help that money can buy, please contact us at Comfort Solutions to learn more. Our professionals will work with you to find the best maintenance steps for your unit. We can even implement these steps for you to ensure that they are done correctly and to keep your fire as safe and effective as possible.