Winter hack: You've been lighting fires the wrong way your whole life

Starting a fire doesn't need to be an arduous process. Photo / Getty Images

What I am about to tell you will change your life.

As winter kicks in, hundreds of thousands of Kiwis will be lighting a fire every night. Yet you are doing it wrong. All of you. And not just slightly wrong, 180 degrees wrong. Upside-down wrong.

This is not my invention, this is a technique which I stumbled on recently from the US, which, unlike in so many areas, actually seems to be ahead in fire lighting.

I have spread the gospel of this method among friends and neighbours who confirm a 100 per cent success rate.

This is not a joke, this is a life hack that will save you countless hours of fussing around over the course of the winter.

Let's start with what you do currently:

You get a firelighter and some newspaper; you build up some kindling around it. You light the fire. You watch it to make sure it doesn't go out. It does go out. You restart it. You put bigger kindling around the kindling that's alight to help it build. It goes out. You start again. Eventually, you get it going. Every 20 minutes or so you go back and add another piece of wood to keep it going. Or you relight it because it had gone out.

I know you'll tell me the way you light it is different from this, but basically it's the same. You got this method from your parents, who got it from their parents, who got it from Stone Age man who found it written on a cave wall somewhere.

And it's wrong.

Introducing the upside-down fire

There are plenty of videos online if you need more help but here are instructions for a wood burner:

• Stack up a bunch of logs at the bottom of the fire. You can pile them up tight as you like, but keep it even on top. This would fill around half the burning space available.

• Next stack up some smaller logs or large kindling at right angles to the original logs.

• Now put some smaller kindling on top of that, again at right angles, with maybe some newspaper (the Herald is ideal for this). This can go close to the top of the wood burner.

• Plonk a firelighter in the middle of the kindling, light it, shut the door and open a beer (or whisky as it's cold) and get on with your life.

Somehow the embers from the top layer will drop down and light the layer below, and so on until before long you have a raging furnace which needs no attention.

It shouldn't work.

But it does.

Be a good neighbour and pass it on.