Top down fire: lighting your fireplace from the top

Lighting an open fireplace works best from top to bottom. Put your thickest logs at the bottom, a layer of thinner wood on top, and right at the top the kindling with two fire starters. Light that top layer with a long fireplace lighter.

The fire then burns slowly downwards. That sounds unnatural, but it works better: the smoke from the wood underneath has to pass up through the flame, and burns on the way. Hence less smoke, a cleaner glass and far less poking.

This approach is called the Swiss method, or top-down. It needs no other wood and no other tools, just a different stacking order.

The classic way is to light the kindling at the bottom. The flame shoots straight up and warms the thick logs above it, but that wood is still cold and starts giving off gases instead of burning.

Those gases are the smoke you see. They go up the chimney unused and settle on your glass and on the walls of the flue. Meanwhile your kindling is spent and the fire collapses, exactly at the moment the thick logs have not caught yet.

So you start poking. And every time you poke, you pull apart the structure the fire had just begun to build.

With the order reversed, the flame burns on top and the heat works its way down slowly. The wood below is dried and warmed gradually before its turn comes.

Nothing special, but three things have to be right.

A firelighter that burns long enough. Paper manages thirty seconds and that is too short. Two pieces from a bag of wood wool firelighters 2 kg (200 pieces) burn for eight to ten minutes, and that is exactly what the top layer needs.

A lighter that reaches the top. With this method you light high up, so you do not have to put your hand into the fireplace. The Champ Tatin has a bent neck that lets you aim in any direction.

Dry wood. Above twenty percent moisture no method works. Let the wood stand indoors for a week in a felt log basket (60 litres) before you burn it.

Gloves are handy as soon as you start adding wood. The heat resistant leather gloves handle the heat of a half hour old fire without trouble.

If you have nothing yet, it is all together in the fireplace basic pack: the firelighters, a lighter and the gloves in one go.

Laying each layer crosswise to the last is not aesthetics but technique. It keeps gaps of one or two centimetres open everywhere, and through those gaps the air is drawn upward along the burning wood.

Stack everything in the same direction and the logs lie flat against each other. The flame cannot get between them and your fire burns only on the outside, while the core stays cold.

You notice the second advantage later in the evening. A crosswise stacked fire collapses evenly instead of toppling over, so your bed of glowing coals stays neatly under the wood.

That bed of coals is where the real return sits, by the way. Flames look good, but the heat you feel in the room comes mostly from the coals underneath. What you need in the way of tools for that is at the fireplace accessories.

The fire collapses after five minutes. Then your kindling was too thick or too damp. Kindling should be the thickness of a thumb, not of a wrist.

More on which lighter is handiest for that is in the 5 best fireplace lighters.

Smoke comes into the room. The chimney is still cold and is not drawing. Hold a burning firelighter in the opening of the flue for half a minute, just above the fireplace. That warms the standing air and gets the draw going. Stay at that opening; fire never belongs in the flue itself.

The glass mists up anyway. Almost always wood that is too wet. A second cause is closing the air supply too soon.

It needs no different wood and no different tools. Just reverse the order: thick at the bottom, thin on top, and light it there.

The first time it feels wrong to light a fire at the top. After one evening without poking and with clean glass you will not go back.