Is your fireplace letting smoke into your room? A smoky fireplace is a nuisance and a downright danger because fireplace smoke carries odorless but deadly carbon monoxide. Diagnosing the cause of your smoky fireplace, or back puffing, is essential to finding the most efficient and cost effective solution to fix a smoky fireplace.

What to do if your fireplace smokes

First, if your fireplace smokes only when you first light your fire, the solution is simple and free! You merely need to warm up your chimney’s flue before you light the fire. Tightly roll a piece of newspaper, light one end like a torch, and hold it inside your fireplace as high as you can. Then immediately light your fire. The pre-warmed flue will ensure the smoke goes up the flue instead of into the room.

If the fireplace allows smoke to escape into your room only on windy days, the answer is to install a Vacu-Stack Chimney Cap. As the wind passes through the Vacu-Stack Chimney Cap, it creates a vacuum above the flue. The harder the wind blows, the harder the Vacu-Stack pulls the smoke up your chimney, keeping your room smoke-free.

If the smoky fireplace problem happens on calm days also, go through the following steps to find a solution:

First, check if the fireplace is getting enough draft to allow air to move up the chimney. Shut off any exhaust fans that may be running, even upstairs in your home. Those exhaust fans are pulling household air (and maybe your fireplace’s smoke) to the fans. If shutting off exhaust fans doesn’t stop the back puffing, test by opening a door or window near the fireplace to see if that corrects the problem. If your fireplace no longer smokes when a door or window is opened, installing an Air Supply Ventilator is the least expensive option. A pricier but sure-to-work option is installing an Enervex or Exhausto Fan Chimney Cap.

Fireplace to flue ratio

The area of your fireplace opening should be no more than 10 times the area of your flue opening. To find the area of your fireplace opening, multiply its height by its width. To compute the area of your flue opening, multiply its inside length by its inside width. If you have a round flue, the formula for area is 3.14 times the radius times the radius.

For example, let’s say your fireplace opening is 30 inches wide and 20 inches high and you have a square flue with an inside width of 8 inches. The area of the fireplace opening is 600 square inches and the area of the flue opening is 64 square inches, making your fireplace area roughly 10 times your flue area. The flue and fireplace opening are properly sized.

If your fireplace opening is more than 10 times the size of your flue opening, installing a Smoke Guard can improve the proportions, allowing the flue to work more efficiently and eliminate your smoky fireplace problem. The Smoke Guards come in either brass or black.

If a Smoke Guard will not sufficiently correct the proportions and all of the above options did not work, your only solution is an Exhausto Fan Chimney Cap.

Enervex Fans: guaranteed to fix a smoky fireplace

Enervex Fan

An Enervex Fan will cure any and all back puffing, smoky fireplace problems. An Enervex or Exhausto Chimney Fan is a weatherproof exhaust fan that mounts on the top of your chimney. These powerful fans create a forced air draft that sucks the smoke from the flue, ending forever the problem of a smoky fireplace. Enervex Fans can even end tricky draft problems found with see-through fireplaces and poorly proportioned corner fireplaces. Also, count on these chimney exhaust fans to put an end to problem odors from your chimney.