Smokeless fire pits like the Breeo are designed to burn off the vast majority of smoke produced before it escapes the fire using a specific airflow design. However, while a Breeo can prevent almost all of the eye-burning smoke from being produced, that is only if everything in the fire pit can work properly.
Using an incorrect type of firewood is the most likely reason your Breeo is smoking. When choosing what wood to fire, picking the right material will go a long way to keeping your Breeo smokeless.
Firewood, however, is not always the culprit behind a smokeless fire pit smoking. You may also need to check other parts of the Breeo to ensure your Breeo can burn the best possible fire.
1. Check the Type of Firewood
The most important thing to remember when choosing wood for a fire is that you want it to be dry. Wet wood, as you might expect, doesn’t burn very well. This means that the fire will need to work harder to burn the wood, leading to a flame that may not burn as hot as it should. In general, a Breeo is designed to help the fire reach the highest possible temperature as a way to burn the smoke before it leaves the pit.
Higher quality wood is also a vital aspect of creating a smokeless fire. Like wet wood, low-quality firewood will have problems starting a flame and continuing to burn. These issues can lead to the Breeo fire producing smoke.
How To Fix
There are ways to test how dry a piece of wood is by hand. A darker color, cracks at the ends of the piece, and the sound it makes when you hit the potential firewood against another piece of wood (described by the American Lung Association as a “hollow sound”) can also help you identify dry wood.
If you want a more reliable way to check if a piece of wood is dry enough to burn, you can purchase a meter that measures the moisture content in a piece of firewood. One such option is this Tavool Wood Digital Moisture Tester on Amazon.com. You want the reading to be below twenty percent; if the reading is higher than that, the wood is not dry enough to use in your fire.
2. Check How Everything Is Set Up in the Breeo
If your high-quality wood is nice and dry, but your Breeo is still smoking, then it’s time to look at other aspects of the pit. Every step in creating the fire, from the fuel to clean-up, is essential to the smokeless results that you want.
Firewood Setup
While it might be tempting to throw the firewood into the Breeo without much thought, how you position the wood plays a part in how well the fire burns. Stacking the wood in what’s known as a “log cabin” pattern is recommended. Simply place two pieces of wood parallel to each other, then place two more pieces parallel in the opposite direction. This method is also known as the “tic-tac-toe” pattern.
Fuel
Just like the firewood, be careful with the other parts of fuel you use with your Breeo, particularly if you are planning to use the fire to cook. The wrong fuel can lead to smoke. This page on the Breeo website goes into more detail about what type of firestarters and kindling to use.
If you need any refreshers on how to build a Breeo fire, check out this handy video on Youtube.
Speed
Fire may be known for its ability to spread fast, but that doesn’t mean you should rush through the setup. Make sure to use properly sized wood, and don’t toss everything into the pit at once, even if you are running behind schedule. Let the fire grow gradually. The more you make the fire work, the more energy it will need and the higher the risk of smoke.
Cleaning
In between uses, you’ll need to make sure to keep your Breeo clean. While the pit’s hotter fire means that there should be fewer remains of ash and other particles compared to regular fires, especially if you let the Breeo burn itself out, the pit will still need a good clean. Leftover ash from one fire can cause smoke in the next.
Why You Should Care About Keeping Your Fire Pit Smokeless
The smokeless selling point of fire pits like the Breeo may seem like a solution to an inconvenience, but there are many more benefits when compared to a regular fire that ranges from safety to financial. We encourage you to also read our Breeo review.
The first is that smokeless fires are healthier. Any exposure to smoke, from a campfire to a burning building, can lead to burning eyes or a cough. However, for people with health issues such as asthma, young kids, and elderly adults, any smoke from fires carries a high potential risk factor. Even for typically healthy people, some particles produced from smoke are not harmless. Smokeless fire pits are safer for everyone involved.
Fire pits like the Breeo are also better for the environment. Smoke from fires can negatively impact the local air, so smokeless fires don’t produce that additional pollution. Another benefit is that because smokeless fire pits are designed to be so efficient at creating a hot fire, less wood is required for each session.
Not only is this a financial benefit to you, but the less wood that is bought for personal use, the less overall demand for wood there is. This leads to fewer trees being cut down for commercial firewood.
Summary
Whatever your reason for choosing the smokeless option of a Breeo fire pit, it’s important to choose high-quality and dry firewood, as a fire working too hard to burn poor, wet wood will lead to smoke. You also want to check how the fire is set up, and make sure everything is done in a way to maximize airflow to allow for a hotter fire that burns the smoke off before it escapes.
