With summer just around the corner, people will be spending more time outdoors. These are the days of swimming in the lake, barbecues with close friends and family, and roasting marshmallows over the fire.

Nowadays, you can find varied shapes, styles, and types of outdoor fire pits online to capture the ideal seasonal experience in your garden safely. When you have kids running around by the light of the fire, safety is the keyword making it vital for the adults in the group to stay abreast of all the precautions to avoid danger and prevent damages.

Flames and sparks have the potential to grow out of control quickly, leading to severe burns and damages to property. If you have a fire pit in your garden space or plan to construct an area, you’ll need to share cautionary tips with your guests so everyone can have a joyful and safe experience with complete peace of mind. Let’s look at a few of these.

What Are Some Fire Pit Safety Tips

When placing a fire pit in your garden space, you and all the adults who’ll be enjoying the area with you need to understand the same key safety tips if there are any problems when the pit is in use.

Children need instructions on how serious fire is and its dangers, plus the requirement to stay a recommended distance from the pit to avoid the potential for injuries. Find a few cautionary tips for fire pits at https://www.thespruce.com/safety-tips-for-fire-pits-1391749/ and a couple more for those who choose to construct a garden fire pit here.

• Getting the garden ready

The fire pit needs to sit on a completely level surface to avoid the chance for the fire to travel onto the surrounding grounds. The structure needs to be placed no less than 10 feet from anything flammable. Of course, that will include your home, vegetation, any wooden fence rows, and on. 

When looking for flammables, look around the perimeter and up for low-hanging branches and how high a roof might be. However, the pit should not be placed directly on a wood deck, grass, or another flammable surface. 

If you don’t have a non-flammable platform to sit your fire pit on, it should be elevated in some way to prevent fire from igniting on the ground.

• Igniting the fire

The first step before igniting a fire is to assess the strength of the wind. Exceptionally windy conditions can carry flames and embers farther, creating a hazard for the people in the area, flammable surfaces, and vegetation surrounding the pit.

The suggestion is to be selective with what you use as a firestarter. Never incorporate kerosene, gasoline, or lighter fluid to ignite the flames, or you will have trouble controlling the fire as it will grow rapidly. The recommendation is to use proper starters like a kitchen lighter or matches.

• Flame maintenance

When you decide to enjoy a fire pit, someone will need to tend it at all times. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the evening with all the guests. It merely means someone needs to be on fire pit duty regardless of how the flames might diminish. These can spark in a second. 

Children and pets should be supervised when there’s a fire with a suggestion to invest in a “spark screen.” This has the capacity to prevent a little one or an animal from falling into the flames. The mesh screens contain embers, so these can’t start garden fires or hit people passing by.

No debris of any sort, including paper, should be tossed into the fire. It can cause the burn to go off-kilter with embers being thrown off. Plus, there’s no way to know which products might produce toxins that you shouldn’t breathe.

Flames can become uncontrollable in a blink, even when you follow all the tips and take every precaution. It’s recommended to keep a bucket of water or a garden hose (or both) nearby to the fire pit if there is an accident or the flames get out of control. If these don’t prove helpful right away with the fire spreading rapidly, it’s critical to call the fire department.

• Shutting down the fire

The flames should be sprinkled with water instead of dumping the water over the fire with the water bucket or the garden hose. 

Doing that will damage the pit. Once there are mere embers, mix the embers and ash with a shovel until the hissing has dissipated. With caution, touch the ash to see if it’s grown cold and adequately dispose of it. Go here for details on fire pit safety.

Final thought

An excellent first step when buying a fire pit is to choose a quality design that encourages safety and invest in optimum tools and equipment to use with the fire pit, like the mesh screen, to avoid potential accidents, especially if you have small children and pets.

Fire pits are ideal for enjoying a lovely summer night with close friends and family. These safety tips will ensure you can do so safely and with peace of mind.