TRANSCRIPT

Today in the Fire Lab we’ll be testing two new products from Fire Burn Good: Breaking Hearts and Bermuda Triangles. Here’s our standard firelighter for reference. Opens from the top, lights with a spark and burns for 5 minutes to produce a hot coal that lasts even longer.
Our new 2-in-1 and 3-in-1 firelighters are equally water resistant, but you pull them apart to open them. revealing the soft cotton centres. You still need to prime them by pulling some of that cotton out into a plume, but the results speak for themselves.


Pictured is our standard firelighter alongside some of our new Breaking Hearts and Bermuda Triangles.
All of our standard lighters have a single cotton ball in the centre that ignites and regulates combustion before becoming a hot coal, and you can see how we fit two cotton balls into every Breaking Heart and three into every Bermuda Triangle.


Breaking Hearts snap into two firelighters, and Bermuda Triangles can break into 3. Or, they can act just as effectively as one large and more powerful lighter. For now, we are going to take a single portion from each of these firelighters and ignite them side by side to see if they pass our main endurance test. We’re also going to find out which firelighter flames out first, so if you’re the betting type, bet now.

On your sparks, get set. Go.

Every firelighter we sell should offer a bare minimum of 5 minutes of hot flame, and that should include single portions from our new 2-in-1 and 3-in-1 range, thus the need for endurance tests like this one.


You’ll notice some slight pooling while the lighters burn in a standalone position on a cold steel plate. This is NOT an issue when they are used to start a reaction in a typical fireplace, as the heat from the combustion reactions they start will reflect back on the lighter making pyrolysis even more efficient and complete, but do note the vapour clouds right above these pools that show the wax fuel wicking its way to the main reaction and the flames above.

We’re back at normal speed after 5 minutes, and all of our firelighters have passed the main test. Those flames indicate a healthy pyrolysis reaction, and the moment they stop, you know you are left with oxidisation alone unless you can exploit the heat from your hot coal to ignite further fuel and keep full combustion going, and I am CALLING it on 1/2 of a Breaking Heart at 5 minutes and 24 seconds.


Sorry if you lost your shirt. Next time, read the stats.


Our next test is a performance test to see what damage we can do with an entire Bermuda Triangle. Today, instead of the usual kindling, we’re using lumber in the form of two short lengths of 38×63 CLS planed Timber.


Rough timber allows smaller slivers of wood to lead the reaction deeper into the grain, but the smooth, finished surfaces of this timber are harder for fire to penetrate. Also, as you can see, the flow of the main reaction is going directly across the grain of the wood, meaning that our reaction will have to work harder to carve the channels that are necessary for a healthy pyrolysis reaction.


Not that this is going to stop our Bermuda Triangle. After 4 minutes, we remove the firelighter and you can clearly see from the flames above our lumber that it has ignited a self-sustaining reaction, and when we seperate the timbers, you can see combustion has been so complete at the centre of the fire that is has already produced ash.
Let’s lay that lumber out again and admire the channels carved against the grain by our firelighter to better enable efficient pyrolysis in the wood, and let’s also marvel at the fact that we not only have plenty of firelighter left, but it can still turn into 3 firelighters any time we care to separate the business, and it’s all down to the magic of those cotton ball centres.


This completes today’s test of Breaking Hearts and Bermuda Triangles. Thanks for joining me in my enthusiasm for fire.
You can buy all of these products on my website at fireburngood.com, and If you’d like to suggest a challenge for our firelighters to test their unique abilities and upper limits , just let me know in the Comments below or get in touch via the Contact Form on our site.


Cheers all.