Important: Safety Warning
This page describes practices involving highly flammable materials in ways that create a serious risk of fire or explosion.
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Heating, Lighting, and Refrigeration › Heating, Lighting, and Refrigeration: Chimneys
Heating, Lighting, and Refrigeration: Chimneys
To Clean Chimneys. - Prepare a bed of hot coals in the stove, throw open the draughts and dampers, and throw on the coals some pieces of old zinc, as the zinc from an old washboard.
This will clean out all soot from the chimney.
Or the chimney may be swept if the shaft is straight by attaching a heavy stone or other weight to the butt of a small pine or hemlock sapling and fastening a rope to its upper part.
The weight will carry the sapling down the chimney, and when it is dragged back the extending branches will sweep clean the soot. Care must be taken to use a rope sufficiently strong and a sapling not too large, so as to prevent the rope from parting or the brush from lodging in the shaft.
To Stop Leaks in Chimneys.-Make a cement of coal tar and sand, and apply as may be convenient within or without.
To Put Out Fires in Chimneys.- Throw sulphur on the fire so that the fumes will ascend the flue. Take precautions not to breathe the fumes of burning sulphur.
Or ascend to the roof and throw salt down the chimney. Or shut off the draught from below if possible by covering the opening to the fireplace with wet blankets or otherwise. Or, if the fire is not too strong, put a tight cover over the top of the chimney.