Why Won’t My Firewood Burn? Follow This Guide To Get Your Fire Burning!

Sometimes, your firewood won’t light, no matter what you do… and that can be frustrating. A single culprit, from sooty workspaces to wet materials, might be challenging to find. If you’re having trouble now or want to avoid trouble in the future, we recommend the following tips for starting and maintaining the brightest fires.

But before we dive into our tips, feel free to learn more about our top-notch kiln-dried firewood that burns better than most!

Are You Using the Best Firewood?

A great fire starts with the best materials. You won’t get very far without the driest and densest wood. Here, we’ll share the best option, but we’ll also tell you how other options fare.

Why Does Some Firewood Not Burn?

The densest wood yields the longest and hottest fires. The easiest and most effective way to discern a wood’s density is to determine whether it’s a hardwood or a softwood. Softwoods, like pine, cedar and spruce, are precisely that — soft. Fires they yield don’t burn brightly or last long. Firewood won’t stay lit if it’s made from softwood. Hardwoods include oak, birch, beech and maple, all dense enough to keep uncannily hot fires going for many hours. Oak is the densest of the hardwoods, generating the most heat for the longest time. We often recommend it to people who use fire as a primary heat source.

Why Firewood Won’t Burn, Even If It’s Hardwood

Good firewood is dry firewood. Removing moisture from hulking logs of firewood is a different story. If you’re looking for firewood, hardwoods are a great place to start but don’t get too excited if you see one in your backyard because fresh wood (a.k.a. green wood) is often too moist for anyone other than a TV survivalist to start a fire with it.

Many major retailers season their firewood before selling it. Seasoning firewood means storing it in a dry, well-ventilated area for six months, give or take. As much moisture as seasoning removes, the process also decreases density by providing the wood time to decompose. After all, it’s dead. Somebody chopped it with an axe. Nobody lives through that.

Kiln drying is much more effective. We keep our firewood in hot kilns for about two days, after which the wood is much drier than if someone had seasoned it, and it hasn’t had nearly as much time to decompose. Accordingly, kiln-dried hardwood is the best firewood.

Store Carefully

There are a few essential things to remember about where you store your firewood. To minimize moisture, stack your firewood above ground and keep enough space among individual logs for ventilation. If you store your firewood outside, shelter it from the elements with a tarp or shed. Not only does moisture reduce flammability, but it can also invite mold that’ll eat away at your wood’s density. Otherwise, when you bring stored firewood indoors, give it time to warm up before trying to light it.

Are You Arranging Wood Effectively?

Especially if you’re making a fire outside, building something strong enough to stand up to wind and rain can be an art. Whatever you design, tinder will have to ignite kindling, and kindling will have to ignite your firewood. Here are a few best practices for structure and more general tips.

Did You Remember (Enough) Tinder and Kindling?

If you don’t have much to use for either and don’t want to go outside, newspapers and lint from the dryer can make great tinder. As for kindling, you’ll need the thinnest pieces of firewood, if not several long branches from the backyard. When you’re ready to lay your tinder and kindling, remember that using too much at once might suffocate the fire.

The Best Way to Build When Firewood Won’t Burn

If you’re using a fire pit outside, arranging your firewood into a log cabin is best. Lay your tinder uniformly around the pit. In the center of the pit, arrange your kindling into a teepee. A teepee shape will allow ventilation to encourage the fire from the kindling onto the firewood. Finally, arrange your firewood into the shape of a log cabin. Place a pair of parallel logs on either side of the pit and place a perpendicular pair on top of the original pair. Rinse and repeat until you’ve laid all the firewood you’ve designated. Remember to light the tinder only.

We recommend an upside-down log cabin if you’re using a fireplace inside. Begin by arranging your firewood, as we’ve explained, but put your kindling and tinder on top. To compensate for the smaller space, lay several pieces of kindling flat upon the firewood and lay the tinder on top of the kindling. While heat rises, a grate inside a fireplace isn’t a big space to house a fire, so we advocate for compactness.

Maintain Balance

Whether you build a log cabin, teepee or lean-to, you must carefully monitor three factors, even after you get a fire going: heat, air and fuel. If pieces of wood within the fire are too far from each other, they’ll burn out. If pieces of wood are too close to each other, they’ll suffocate the fire. Finally, if your fire has darkened enough, only another log might do the trick. Of course, having excellent firewood in the first place works best.

Maintain Your Workspace

Any problems you’ve been having with starting a fire might also come down to the condition of your workspace. Did you build a good firepit? Is creosote building up inside your chimney? Your problem might have nothing to do with seasoned firewood or a poor building strategy.

If Firewood Won’t Burn, is the Pit Good to Go?

A good firepit must be as far from plant matter as possible, but this is more of a safety concern than anything else. When you dig a firepit and make a bed for a fire, nothing apart from dirt should be inside – a lot of dirt. Make sure that your bed of dirt is at least three inches thick. As it’s inside your home, a fireplace requires more aggressive pruning. Make sure ash doesn’t remain beneath the grate for long. Creosote may also stick to the fireplace’s walls, so scrape that off.

How’s the Chimney?

Chimneys require annual maintenance, at least. Using soft or moist wood to make fires might require you to schedule maintenance more often, but hardwood doesn’t exempt your chimney from a good clean. Without regard to starting fires, a clogged chimney can keep deadly fumes inside your home.

Mind the Damper

Make sure the damper is wide open before you build your fire. Sometimes, opening it leaves it only slightly ajar.

Warm the Flue

Cold air can fill the chimney flue in winter, keeping warm air from exiting. You may benefit from warming the chimney with a blow dryer or a makeshift torch (since you’re making a fire anyway). Starting a fire in a warm chimney instead of a cold one can be the difference between a generous blaze and no fire.

Build Better Fires and Keep Them Going!

Figuring out what to do when firewood won’t burn can be difficult. If you follow our tips, we know you’ll be on your way to building better fires and keeping them going for longer. We hope you feel more confident about your fire-making abilities with this great information in your fire-building knowledge arsenal!

For more information about making fires with the best premium firewood, call us at 815-337-1451 or stop by for a visit. We’re not far from Crystal Lake, IL.