During these winter months, is there a better way to spend the night than to curl up in front of a fireplace and let time stand still? Perhaps you have been outside during the day and the cold winds have whipped at your feet, leaving them numb and icy. Toasting them in front of an open fire is certainly a treat that we would all walk miles to experience. There is something about the comfort and ambiance that creates an open fire and draws us all in like bears to honey. So if you’re lucky enough to have an open or wood-burning fireplace in the living room of your home, the cold winter months are a time to really look forward to.
Now the thing is that with an open fire the street is not entirely easy. Fire needs fuel to burn, and while logs aren’t expensive to buy, they do cost. And then there’s the matter of transporting the logs back to your home, too. Most local hardware stores will sell you quantities of firewood logs, and in some cases they may even deliver them to you. But the point here is that you still need to do everything you can to organize fuel for your fire.
But if there was another option to fuel your fire that was virtually free, required no delivery or pickup, and even helped the environment, would you consider that option? Don’t be a fool too, I hear you say. Well there is another way to fuel your fire and that is with a briquette maker. The briquette maker is a small tool that you can place old newspapers, cardboard and junk mail into and compress into briquettes that can be used as a substitute for wood logs in your fire. And with the average household producing roughly 500kg of waste paper each year, there’s no shortage of paper to make your briquettes from.
Making your own briquettes is a very simple process. All you need to do is soak the old paper in water and then place it in the briquetting machine. When you have enough paper, compress it and the end result will be a briquette. Dry these briquettes by placing them somewhere warm and then once dry these briquettes will give you around 2 hours of burn time for each paper log. They are smokeless, odorless and leave only minute deposits of ash. A pretty perfect burning fuel that is extremely cheap to produce and helps save the environment in my opinion.