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Your wood heater looks fine. The fire lights, the room warms up, the glass is mostly clear. Meanwhile, across a whole winter of slow overnight burns, a dark tar-like layer has been forming inside the flue where you never see it. That layer is creosote, and it is the main reason neglected wood heaters cause house fires. 

You load the firebox, hold a match to the kindling, and wait. The fire catches, then sputters. The wood hisses, steam creeps from the cut ends, and the glass fogs with smoke. An hour later the room is still cold. Nine times out of ten, the problem is the wood rather than the heater.  

You know the chimney. Two doors down, it pours grey smoke across the street most winter nights, and you can smell it from the back step.

Your own wood heater, lit in the same cold, barely shows a wisp above the roofline. Same fuel, same weather, a completely different result. The difference is how each fire burns.

Open the door of a cold wood heater and the lining can tell you a lot. A fine line through a brick is usually not urgent. A loose, missing, crumbling or badly broken brick is different because it can expose the steel firebox to direct heat.

A wood heater can be the right answer for a cold Melbourne lounge, but the wall you like is not always where it can go. For wood heater installation in Melbourne, the first check is whether the building can support the exact heater, flue route, clearances, roofline and local requirements.

Wood heater terminology can become confusing when product choices, installation checks, fire behaviour and spare parts all use different words for connected parts of the same system.

The fastest way to ruin a good wood heater is to feed it wet wood. The slowest way is to keep doing it for a few winters in a row. Knowing how to store firewood at home is what stands between you and that mistake. Firewood needs to be dry, off the ground, covered on top with the sides left open, and given time. Most home stacks fail on at least one of those four. This guide walks you through all four, in the order they affect burn quality. 

Wood heater glass that keeps going black is almost always a combustion problem rather than a glass problem. The black film is tar from incomplete burning, condensed on cool glass before it had a chance to burn off. The fix is in the fire rather than the cleaner.

The cabinetmaker has gone. The slab is poured. The installer's marked where the flue boots will sit. You're standing in the lounge with a tape measure, working out where everything goes. The sofa you bought before the renovation started is in the wrong place.