My stove won’t light, and smoke is pouring into the room!!!
You’ve done something when you cleaned it! My chimney is blocked.
This is a common statement that we hear every year when customers first light their appliance, or indeed during the season when the temperature drops. Even customers who have used stoves for years can encounter this problem and don’t realise.
The symptom of this problem is smoke billowing into the room when you are trying in desperation to light your stove and nothing you can do will help to stop it. Quite simply it is neither of these, but more likely that there is cold air in the flue. This forms a cold plug which stops the chimney from working as it should, by drawing air up.
In this instance the remedy is that it is necessary to get some heat up the chimney before you can attempt to light the stove. The warm air will push the cold air from the chimney and allow the chimney to draw like it should.
To do this you can light the fire the ‘SKANDINAVIAN WAY’ by putting the fire lighters on top of the kindling and letting the fire burn downwards, or, in more serious cases, quite often in an external steel chimney, it may be necessary to use a blow torch or similar, to warm the chimney. I have a blow torch specifically to light our stove as it is pretty much guaranteed the cold air will disappear within a minute or so of a good blast with it and then use it to light the fire lighters afterwards.