How to Start a Fire in your Soapstone Stove

Here are a few tricks for starting a fire in your Soapstone wood stove or any other wood burring stove for that matter. First off when burring wood in your Soapstone stove you must use seasoned wood!!!!!!! Do not use wet or what is called green or fresh cut wood in any wood burring stove, there are a few reasons and I will talk about this in my next post. Back to starting the fire. I take a few prices of dry kindling or twigs and arrange them in front of the air intake on my Hearthstone Mansfield Soapstone stove, next in the center of this pile I but two or three single sheets of balled up newspaper. Do not use colored pages and or magazines the dyes and chemicals they papers are sometimes coated with is not stuff you want to burn in any stove. Set the air intake lever so it is all the way open. Now you can light the fire with a match. Once the kindling starts burring you can take some small logs no more than an inch to two inches in diameter and place one laying down starting from the front of the stove to the back on one side of your burring kindling, next place two or three small logs or pieces of wood the same side across this log and the center of the fire horizontally. This is what I call my lean to method of lighting a fire at this point you should close the stove door if you have not already done so. My next trick with this is I take one or two sheets of newspaper and pour a hand full of  Wood Pelletsinto each sheet and then close them up by twisting the folded up end to make what I call a pellet meatball LOL. Now place a medium sized log laying it from front to back against one side of the burring fire just like when you started with the small logs, then drop the two pellet meatballs on top of your burring fire, then place two or three logs horizontally across the log you had just placed spacing them to give air flow between them close the stove door all the way unless the pellet meatballs have not ignited which they should unless you did something wrong. If not you can keep the door open a crack until they light. What you should have is a roaring fire going. When I get a chance I will post a video of this so you can see how  it's done.