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.

Hellooo,

How appropriate, this thread.
Swept the 2 chimneys just yesterday and changed the hat on one of them as it was getting a bit tired and the horizontal rain manages to get in.

Fire lighting, well there s a thing.

To share intimate habits on a forum ...... and short story long
Composting toilet, pee makes the bucket both heavy and stinky, so if possible, visitors are invited to sprinkle their nitrogen in the great outdoors, possibly on the woodchip piles.
I have my special easy fit pee watering can and sometimes avail myself of bathroom stationery, otherwise referred to as bog or toilet paper.
And yes there is a bag to collect said paper which is then used to light fires.

For the RMH, I sometimes have to resort either to a hair dryer or gas blow torch to heat the vertical pipe to get the draft going.
Yes, there are plans afoot to improve the system when time allows.

As a member of our local mushroom club, I am looking at all the wondrous benefits the mushroom provides, including  
Fomes fomentarius, commonly known as the tinder fungus or horse hoof fungus, is a perennial bracket fungus historically prized as a reliable natural fire starter and ember - this last bit copied from oogle
It also has medicinal virtues and was one the two mushrooms found with the 5thousand year old man buried in the Alps.

I don t do hand sanitizer, have sometimes resorted to wax.

It is still warm and very dry here with no rain expected till mid October but there are rumours that there will be a winter.

Thanks to all with autumnal blessings
MH

as usual,I am late to the party. just going to add my nickels worth.
Charcoal briquets - I use a chimney deal, we found some that have a latch on the bottom to just drop the lit briquets out instead of pouring them out of the top. I didn't like the flying embers when pouring out the briq's on the first chimney I was gifted, but finding the drop is easier on me.
 lighting them I use some of the same finely shaved cedar I use on starting my wood-stove mixed with very small kindling, and very seldom have any issues. I very seldom use anything except a stick match on the charcoal lighting.
 on the other hand, I enjoy lighting my fires with the "old" methods. I grew up with a very old, very big wood cook-stove that also heated the house.
as a very young person, around 10 years old I was "assigned" the chore of ALWAYS making sure there was a few days worth of kindling in the bucket for lighting the stove.
at 12 I was running a small chainsaw and was told to make sure we had this huge area filled with firewood before I could go play on summer vacation. That huge area was probably 4 cords, but I am guessing, at that point in my life I wanted to be out in the woods playing, and it seemed to take forever to cut enough wood for it.
It apparently didn't make me hate wood heat, I actually can't tolerate anything else for heat with for very long. the feel of it, as well as the ambience will keep me burning until I can't light a fire anymore.
 Current house: 25 years ago I put  my first brand new stove in. house was almost two years old.  
so now I usually start my fires with a spark or ember - I have even practiced using a bow drill outside, getting my ember, taking it in and getting the stove lit.
this is easier because of how dry I get my wood before putting it to work. I have notice that 4 months in the high desert we are moving to drys out the split wood to under 10%. I stacked up some fairly green splits on a summer morning over there, was working nearby, and could hear he splits cracking as they dried.
Ferro rods - we compete for 1 shot fire status guru. I have lit with a fire piston for months at a time - it makes an ember a person just has to build from.
  Bringing it to life that was has been a very rewarding experience for me. I collect cedar anytime I find it - as I cut it into smaller pieces, and then using a decent knife, I shave thin strips of it as the major portion of my smallest tinder. then of course very small fir, and move into tending a full fire.
 I have learned through the years - along with a moisture meter - where I live takes a minimum of 2 years for cut and split firewood to fully dry/season. logs can be down for many years, some will rot before they season out inside. very dry wood works better in any stove - moisture takes the heat up the chimney, and helps build up creosote - and we all know that is not a good thing.
 Another thing I have found is even worn out cotton clothing is sometimes hard to make good char-cloth from. it appears that federal government has required fire retardant on even our clothing - I knew about furniture, but I learned about the clothing about ten years ago. char cloth with whatever nasty chemical they use doesn't take a spark well. I am hoping that it mostly stays on the cloth and isn't what has made me have to deal with skin cancer.
I spent a year in the city with electric heat and didn't care for that entire experience. I would rather live outside, and thankfully I kind of do, but I am domesticated enough to own a house.
and as a side note, I am planning on using solar water heat along with 100% solar electric, and use hydronic floor heat - but will still have a wood-stove for "backup" and Christmas eve, - just for the ambiance.

I'm still using damaged/soiled egg cartons, but now I'm painting them with discarded beef tallow/bacon fat/cooking oil. Burns hot, works fine, and uses up waste materials. All good -- as long as I keep them out of reach of the dogs haha.

I've experimented with firestarting a lot recently, although more for campfires.

It seems good tinder has 2 properties: easy to light (e.g. with a spark) and burns long and hot enough to light your smaller sticks or kindling to transition to a real fire.

I've found that pretty much anything really dry with a lot of surface area works: fine wood shavings, dryer lint, cotton balls/pads for makeup removal. These all catch fire very easily. If you then add any sort of hydrocarbon, e.g. a fat, an oil, (apparently hand sanitizer), petroleum jelly.. they will burn a lot longer and hotter.

At this point we're basically inventing tar pitch torches or molotov cocktails from first principles heh.

I've found that if my kindling is small and dry enough, I don't even need to wax/oil/lube the dry stuff. Just the other day I put down 2 cotton balls. They lit from the very first spark off the ferro rod, and my kindling was so small and dry that it immediately caught fire within 3 seconds or so.

Other days I've had to supplement large amounts of petroleum jelly because my kindling was so wet that I had to dry it out for 5-10 minutes before it would start to burn. But yes, with enough petroleum jelly or similar, it'll burn for that long and quite hot.

M Pearson wrote:I've experimented with firestarting a lot recently, although more for campfires.

It seems good tinder has 2 properties: easy to light (e.g. with a spark) and burns long and hot enough to light your smaller sticks or kindling to transition to a real fire.

I've found that pretty much anything really dry with a lot of surface area works

Good comments. Surface area is key to catching that first spark, and sustaining that first flame.

Way back when I was working on my primitive firemaking skills, I used an actual flint and steel (not the hot mischmetal ferro rods we have now, which are awesome). It was an exercise in humility and patience. Everything had to be just right. I used cattail fuzz to catch the spark, the shredded inner bark of dead poplar trees to catch the first flame, and then a progression of tiny shredded hardwood twigs to stabilize the fire. All of this was carefully prepared beforehand -- the first flame only lasted seconds. But I did it! (Pardon me while I have a small preen. )

The interesting thing about making fire out of almost nothing is that you look at available resources around you through a completely different lens. You automatically spot and gather resources as you walk through a landscape -- especially if they are dry.