Fireplace Tool

The Single Most Useful Fireplace Tool

Each fireplace tool has its place in building and maintaining your fire, of course, but there is one which is more important than all the others put together; one which, if you had to pick only one tool, would be able to do the task of all the others, if necessary. This is, of course, your humble but incredibly useful fireplace poker. Little more than a sharp stick with a hook on the end, it is still the most useful--and versatile--of all fireplace tool types.

The standard fireplace tool set includes

1. the poker,
2. the bellows set,
3. the ash shovel,
4. the fireplace tongs
5. the hearth brush
6. the broad shovel.  (sometimes)

Looking at the array of tools, the poker might almost be the last one you would pick out as the most useful (all right, maybe the brush would be the very last choice. But the poker would almost certainly be a close second.) And yet, everything that the other tools can do, the poker can do, or a properly built fire can.

Take, for example, the bellows fireplace tool. Many people rely on them to start their fires, and yet a fire that is properly built, with room for the logs to breath, will not need them. Remember that fire is a combination of heat and oxygen; no oxygen, no fire.

Second, the tongs. These are useful for rearranging small pieces of wood on the fire--but any piece of wood you can arrange with tongs, you can arrange with the convenient little hook on the end of the poker. It isn't as easy, but remember, we're looking at the most useful tool here.

Needless to say that that the huge varity of the different type of tools and the long history of fire-places have created a very big antique second hand fireplaces tools market. Many classy and ancient stove fireplace tools can be found for outrageous prices all over the european flee markets and ebay.

And, lastly, setting aside the brush, which makes your hearth look good but isn't really necessary, you have your shovels. These are useful, definitely, for scooping out ashes, shifting embers, and getting critical air flow in underneath the grate by clearing out the ashes and embers that accumulate there. But the truth is, the poker can do all of that except for scooping out ashes, and that can be done with a piece of strong cardboard after the ashes are completely cool. The poker is by far the single most useful fireplace tool. Period.