Charcoal grill / wood stove lighters

I’m curious to hear what you folks use for lighting charcoal for a grill and/or your wood/rocket heater.

Presently, I’ve been using parafin cubes and a charcoal chimney for lighting charcoal. The charcoal chimney is great and lights with paper too but the cubes have proven to be easier and more reliable. I’m grilling or smoking at least a few times a week so the cost for the cubes is worth the reliability plus no worries of paper embers flying off considering our windy & dry mountain environment.

For the wood stoves we have always used paper. It is a perfect way to upcycle the junk mail that we get throughout the year. We also grab the free newspapers when we go into town, also use the packing paper from packages. We sometimes use paper egg cartons with the wood chips off the ground that accumulate from chopping wood. Some people use dryer lint but we use a clothes line to dry everything so we have nothing more than pocket lint :-).

What do you use? Does anyone make their own lighters? If so, what’s your recipe?

The places I haunt often have cases of hand sanitizers available for free.
I grab all of it I can.
It is very safe accelerant, but keep in mind, the flame can be invisible.

That's really interesting William, I assume it is the alcohol base. Good to know. We're pretty remote but I'll keep it in mind when we make trips to the city.

I rarely use paper, except in a pinch.

For my little outdoor wood stove, I have been squirting hand sanitizer on fine kindling and it actually burns quite well. As William says, there are lots of places trying to get rid of it. I have a case and a half in my shop, and some of it gets used for cleaning/degreasing but I'll never get through it all.

For commercial starters, I buy packages of dollar-store firestarters (pkg. of 12) that are wax and fibre pressed together. These give a steady, reliable flame that reliably gets fires going (I hate restarting!).

I'm also using up the last of a hexane based BBQ starter cubes (ZIP brand, bought on clearance), which work well but they stink like diesel so I won't buy them again.

I have also used tea-light candles with a chunk of cotton rag pushed into the centre to act as a wick.

The best homemade firestarters I've found use pressed-paper egg cartons that are too far gone to reuse. I paint oil or wax on them, and the paper acts as a great wick. They burn with a satisfying roar in the draft of the wood stove.

Great information Douglas. We're heading to the city Friday to do some shopping so we'll keep an eye out for hand sanitizer.

I do a lot of woodworking and always save the saw dust from the tablesaw dust collector. We mix it in with the compost mostly. I was thinking of buying some parafin and mixing up sawdust/wax blocks but I don't want to spend a bunch of money on wax to just burn it.

Our small local newspaper just let the community know that they are cleaning out their stockpile of old unsold papers and have bundles of 50 free for the taking. So, I paid them a visit on my last trip into town and got a couple of bundles. That will last a while.

Regarding hand sanitizer, I often see ads on Kijiji and no doubt there are more on Craigslist etc. The common theme is they want it gone, it's free, please help us out. In the uncertainty of the pandemic a lot was produced, and now there are literally tons of it that nobody knows what to do with. Grab it and burn it!

I use laundry lint and a lighter. My tinder is built up over the laundry lint, then over that goes kindling/sticks/a log or two (if I'm doing "a fire") or my charcoal chimney, full of charcoal briquettes (if I'm grilling).

I keep my laundry lint in two nested gallon ziplock bags (nesting two is more resistant to critical tearing) in the box with my wood, and also keep a plastic tub on a shelf next to my clothes dryer. As I clean lint out of the clothes dryer it goes in the tub, and then when the ziplock bags are empty I refill them with the contents of the tub.