Fireplaces are not as common in houses as they were a mere decade ago, but the fact of the matter is that if you have a fireplace in your home, you need to make sure it is kept clean. There are several reasons why this is so, but the most important one is an issue of the immediate safety of you and your family. Fireplaces, when burned over long periods of time, tend to create embers that build up directly as the length of time since the last cleaning gets longer. A lot of these embers are still ignitable under the right conditions because they tend to be very dry and very combustible, meaning that you could start a fire in your own house if you do not clean them out on a regular basis. The difference is that an ember fire would be uncontrolled and could cause severe damage and even death if evacuation is not quick. You can prevent all that from even becoming an issue by making sure you clean your fireplace regularly.

Besides the safety issue, there is also the issue of cleanliness. The old expression is that cleanliness is next to godliness and as far as fireplace cleaning is concerned this is absolutely true because it will give you a chance to get rid of ash, soot and smoke stains which build up in a fireplace and chimney over the course of the time in which the fire is used. Most people that clean their fireplace does so during the first week of warmth, banking on the fact that they will not have to use the fireplace again for at least a season and maybe a season and a half, allowing the fireplace to remain cool and clean for a long time after the scrubbing has been done. If you are about to clean your fireplace, here are some tips to get you started.

Use the Right Items

Cleaning the fireplace is actually an unique cleaning experience when you compare it to the rest of your home. The rest of your home requires sponges and a lot of scrubbing and while this can certainly be used with a fireplace, it is not the main tool that you should use.

The first tool that you will need to clean your fireplace is a shovel. The shovel removes all the larger chunks of material that remains in your fireplace. If you grab a garbage bag at the same time you use your shovel you can just take the material right from the fireplace and dump it into the garbage bag. With the average sized fireplace, a few minutes should be all you need to finish your work with a shovel.

Once you are done with the shovel, you should either use a broom or a vacuum to get rid of all the other fine-grained materials that have been left behind after months of burning wood in the fireplace. These are materials that have been burned several times through multiple fires and are now similar to sand in their texture and known as soot to most fireplace cleaners. Once you have finished using the shovel and vacuum to get rid of the excess materials in the fireplace, you are ready to do the real cleaning. You could use a vacuum for the entire process, but you run the risk of breaking the cleaner if you run into a particularly large piece of debris.

Solvent-Based Cleaning

When people think about solvent-based cleaning, the automatic image that pops into their mind is the image of soap and water. Things are a bit more complicated than that with a fireplace since you need some heavy-duty stuff to get rid of the stains it usually incurs, but a lot of cleaning material can be found around your household right now. A good example of this would be vinegar, although washing soda is a good option as well. If you wanted some really heavy-duty stuff you could go out to your local hardware store and purchase a fireplace cleaner that was designed especially for this task. Either way, make sure you have a generous amount of the solvent ready because you will definitely need it when you clean the fireplace. The one major thing you need to keep in mind here however is that vinegar should never be mixed with either ammonia or bleach. Both of those combinations can result in a highly toxic substance that can cause death just through the act of breathing it. It is high risk for no real gain in cleaning ability; so make sure you do not do it!

Once you have the solvent ready, it is time to roll up your arm sleeves and get down to work! Using a cloth or a sponge, take generous amounts of the liquid that you chose for cleaning and scrub the entire fireplace ragged. You want your arms to ache at the end of the exercise because only then will you know for sure that you scrubbed it enough to get rid of everything. If you are using a dilute vinegar solution or a tub of washing soda to scrub, you should scrub once and then let the coat sink in for about half a hour before coming back and scrubbing again. There is no hard and fast rule for exactly how much scrubbing you should do, so make sure you pay attention to what the firebox used to look like before you started and what it looks like now. Use that comparison mentally to decide when you should stop cleaning.

Rinse and Be Proud

Once you have come to a point where you feel the scrubbing has paid off and you are done using the cleaning liquid, make sure you get a tub of warm water and then use that tub to rinse the entire area that you just scrubbed. Once that is done, you can sit back, relax and congratulate yourself on having cleaned the entire fireplace by yourself.