If your home has a fireplace, enjoying it can be a wonderful part of homeownership. However, routine inspection and maintenance are required to protect everyone from accidents. We encourage you to involve the whole family in practicing good fire safety habits so you can continue to enjoy your fireplace with peace of mind.

Important Fireplace Safety Tips

Regardless of fireplace design, some safety tips are universally applicable. Continually monitor children and pets around a fire and keep them from getting too close. Schedule annual chimney inspections, ideally before you use your fireplace for the first time in a season. Here are more rules to follow:

• Keep the area in front of your fireplace free of decorations (at least three feet away)
• Make sure your damper is fully open before you light your fire
• Always use a spark screen in front of your fireplace (except while attending to the fire)
• If your fireplace has a glass door, leave it open while a fire is burning and closed once the fire has been extinguished
• Fireplaces with a glass door should have an additional mesh screen to keep embers contained while the glass door is open
• Only burn well-seasoned wood in your fireplace; burning other items is a safety hazard
• Never use flammable liquid to start a fire
• Fires should be built toward the back of the fireplace on a supporting grate
• Don’t burn too much wood at one time
• Never leave your fireplace unattended while a fire is going
• Never chop up and burn a real Christmas tree at the end of the season, as they contain flammable sap
• Allow ashes to cool before disposing of them 
• Douse and saturate ashes with water during disposal, as ashes can reignite
• Only close the damper once the ashes are cool
• Stack firewood outdoors and at least 30 feet away from your home
• Keep your roof clear of branches, leaves, and debris
• Always keep a fire extinguisher easily accessible
• Install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, if you haven’t already
• Test your alarms once a month, and change the batteries at least once a year

Schedule Annual Inspections

Even if you don’t regularly use your fireplace, staying up to date on inspections is still very important. A professional assessment helps you stay on top of deterioration from the elements outside your home, prevents carbon monoxide hazards, and ensures that no animals are building nests in the flue. The National Fire Protection Association recommends that chimneys and fireplaces be inspected at least once a year. Maintenance recommendations and costs will vary, depending on how you use your fireplace, but being proactive about fireplace safety is vital to keeping your family safe. 

Additionally, while a fire might seem obvious to an onlooker, chimney fires can technically occur without your knowledge and/or obvious external signs of destruction. Damage from a chimney fire can increase the risk of an accident, even if you’re not using your fireplace regularly. Annual chimney inspections include looking for signs of chimney fires and suggesting how to fix the issue. 

Suppose you know you’ve had a chimney fire in the past. In that case, you should always have your chimney professionally inspected before using it again—even if the fire department responded to the incident. The fire department’s job is to control and suppress the fire and does not include cleaning and providing maintenance recommendations.

How Frequently Do Chimneys Need to Be Cleaned?

The Chimney Safety Institute of America recommends that masonry fireplaces be cleaned if they have either ⅛” of buildup or any creosote (a mixture of wood and tar residue) present in the fireplace. They recommend that factory-built fireplaces should be cleaned if they have any “appreciable” buildup—not simply for safety reasons, but also to prolong the life of the fireplace. Annual inspections will inform you whether your chimney needs to be professionally cleaned.