How to clean a chimney

Heating a house, summer cottage or bath is rarely complete without a stove or boiler. For our winters, this equipment is optimal: it can produce the required amount of heat. But stoves and boilers also require maintenance, and one of the mandatory procedures is chimney cleaning.

Why is the chimney overgrown with soot

The combustion process of fuel is an oxidation process, and this requires oxygen and high temperature. If even one of these conditions is not met, soot appears - this is the result of insufficient oxidation of carbon. Externally, the presence of soot can be determined by the color of the smoke - if it is black, it means it contains soot particles, but most of it settles in the chimney, especially in places of turns.

Now a little about what can cause the active formation of soot:

• Raw firewood. If you put undried wood on the fire, they dry first. This takes a lot of energy, which greatly knocks down the temperature in the firebox. We get subcooling of carbon, a large cloud of black smoke and, after a while of using raw fuel, we will have a clogged chimney.
  

  The use of raw wood leads to the accumulation of soot deposits

• Waste incineration - plastic and plastic bags. Better to throw it in the trash. Also, a lot of soot is formed when burning plywood scraps, Chipboard, OSB... The glue contained in them clogs the chimney very quickly - after two months of using such fuel, the chimney can be completely overgrown.
• Insufficient traction. There can be two options - the air supply is stopped in order to prolong the combustion process (the firewood is switched to smoldering mode) or the chimney has insufficient height. Well, the thrust can also deteriorate due to the fact that a lot of soot has already accumulated in the pipe.

The rate at which the chimney is overgrown with soot also depends on the type of firewood. Resinous spruce and pine in this regard are not the best choice, but not everyone has the opportunity to heat with expensive oak or other deciduous species. In any case, you can make sure that the wood is dry. For this it is worth building woodcutter more spacious, so that it can hold a stock for 2-3 years. Then you can use the most seasoned and dried logs, and let the fresh ones lie, reach condition.

How can you clean the chimney from soot

There are three ways to clean the chimney:

Chimney brush

This chimney cleaning has one feature: if there is good draft, most of the chimney soot flies into the chimney. Therefore, firstly, you need to attach yourself so that you do not fall off the roof from involuntary movement, and secondly, put on goggles and a respirator. Gloves do not hurt either, but they are needed so that the rope does not hurt your hands.

If you decide to make a ruff for cleaning the chimney yourself, hang the ball at the bottom, and centered. Weights or wrenches are not suitable - sooner or later they become a surprise in the chimney. You will be lucky if you can remove the gun without disassembling the pipe.

You can hang a ball at the bottom

The chimney is not always such that it can be cleaned from above - sandwich pipe can rise several meters above the roof. You can't put a ladder to it, you can't get there in any other way. In this case, the chimney is cleaned from below. For this, there are flexible rod ruffs. Fragments of the rod are connected to one another, the ruff moves along the pipe. In this case, part of the soot is also carried away by the traction, but part of it falls down and this must also be taken into account. Professional chimney sweeps use special vacuum cleaners for collection (not household ones, since soot is explosive), with self-cleaning you will have to collect everything by hand.

Chimney cleaning from below

If you have a fireplace, everything is simple - access is free, but if it is a boiler or a sauna stove, the matter is more complicated. If the chimney has a condensate collector, removing it, you can easily run the ruff into the pipe. If there are no revisions, you will have to try to get to the pipe through the firebox. If this is not possible, you will have to disassemble the chimney. Then it's better to immediately remake it by putting a tee with a glass.

Chimney dry cleaning products

You can clean the chimney with chemicals while it is not too clogged. If the pipe is brick, these products help to make mechanical cleaning less frequent. As an independent tool, they can be used for ceramic chimneys or made of stainless steel. All these powders or logs for removing soot from the pipe are preventive. It is not always possible to clean the chimney from a large amount of soot. There were cases when the soot that had fallen off after burning the powder blocked the chimney tightly. I had to take a ruff and clean it by hand.

Despite these shortcomings, the funds are used and here's why: during processing, the soot that is in the boiler, sauna stove or in the smoke ducts also softens. It is a little pleasure to chuck them by hand, and regular use does a pretty good job.

There are plenty of soot cleaners in stores, but here are the most popular ones:

• Kominichek. This is a Czech-made drug. The package contains paper bags with granules packaged in them. This soot remover is placed in a well-heated oven without breaking the bag. A whole paper bag is placed on the firewood; there is no need to tear apart the product. According to reviews, it works fine. The most effective as long as the soot layer is not more than 2 mm - it cleans the chimney to clean walls.
  

  Powder for cleaning chimneys "Kominichek"

• Log for cleaning the chimney. Most often called "Chimney sweep", but there are other names. They are produced by different companies, therefore the boxes differ in design. Regardless of the manufacturer, the rules for use are the same: a log for cleaning chimneys is placed in a well-heated oven. That's all, in the process of combustion, the substances contained in the smoke soften the soot and it evaporates or crumbles down.
  

  Chimney cleaning log

• Powder products for cleaning pipes from soot of domestic production. There are a lot of them, a lot of different names. Most of it contains the word "chimney sweep": Cheerful chimney sweep, Chimney sweep happy summer resident, Chimney sweep Express, etc. There are many names and firms, the essence is the same - powder is packed in bags, the bags are put into a burning oven.

After using all chemicals, the room must be ventilated, the stove or fireplace must be cleaned. Please note that after processing, the soot can pour out for a couple of days - the remains fly off.

Traditional methods of cleaning the chimney

The easiest way to prevent the formation of soot is to heat an already preheated stove with aspen wood. They burn with a very hot flame, the soot in the chimney burns out. The action is effective, but dangerous - if a lot of soot has accumulated, it explodes when ignited and can break the pipe.

Put a couple of logs when heating the stove and preventive cleaning of the chimney from soot is done

There are safer folk remedies with which chimney cleaning is both effective and safe. Add half a kilogram of salt or about a bucket of potato peelings to a melted and well-heated oven. It is better to dry the cleanings or add raw ones little by little - so as not to bring down the temperature in the firebox. The action is approximately the same as when using chemicals, only a little softer - soot flies out of the pipe for another three days.