If your home has a fireplace, you may find yourself wanting to use it during the winter. And while using your fireplace can help to offset your other heating costs, they can also make you more susceptible to having an uncontrolled fire happening in your home or other damage and danger. But if you take care to be safe when using your fireplace, you can reduce your chances of something like this happening.

To help you see how this can be done, here are three safety tips for using your home’s fireplace during winter.

Keep All Parts Of Your Fireplace Clean

Before you start any kind of fire in your fireplace, you’ll want to make sure that your fireplace and all of the associated parts are clean and well maintained.

When you use your fireplace, it can build up with ash and other debris. If you clean this out regularly, you shouldn’t have an issue with this buildup increasing the risk of having an uncontrolled fire happening. But if you don’t clean this out, you could run the risk of having some of this debris catch fire and cause a bigger fire than you were bargaining for. A fire suppression system can help to take care of this, but it’s better to just keep an uncontrolled fire from happening in the first place by keeping everything clean.

Place A Screen Over Your Fireplace

Another risk that you need to be careful with then using your fireplace is having sparks or other debris coming out from the fireplace. While small sparks usually won’t cause a big problem, large sparks and other debris that comes out from the fire can cause damage to your home.

If the sparks that come out of your fire are big enough, they can catch things on fire and cause a lot of damage to your home. Luckily, this can be avoided by placing a screen over your fireplace. Screens can help to keep any sparks or other debris from coming out of the fireplace and into your home.

Clear Out The Space Around Your Fireplace

In addition to having a screen over your fireplace, another thing you should do to help keep your home and property protected is to keep the space around your fireplace clear of any items that could heat up a lot or catch on fire.

Ideally, you should keep at least three feet of clear space around your fireplace. This will help ensure that nothing gets too close to get caught on fire or gets too close so that things heat up too much and become dangerous to touch.

If you are planning to use your home’s fireplace this winter, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you do so safely.