If you have a wood heater in your home that you intend to have serviced soon, here are a few steps that you will need to take in preparation for the arrival of the servicing technician.

Remind everyone in the house not to light a fire in the heater the day before or on the morning of the appointment

It is important to remind the occupants of your house not to use this appliance the day before or the morning of the appointment. The reason for this is as follows: most wood heaters are made from cast iron or another alloy. Because of this, the components from which these appliances are made get very hot, both when they are lit and for several hours after the flames in their chambers have been extinguished.

As such, if your wood heater is used the night before or the morning of the servicing, many of its parts might still be hot. Whilst the servicing technician will be able to extinguish any embers that might still be burning on the heater's grate, they won't be able to cool down the appliance itself. This could present a problem, as if the heater is too hot for them to touch without getting burnt, they might not be able to do many of the tasks that they usually would when servicing this type of appliance. For example, cleaning the appliance's flue could be difficult as, in addition to the flue itself being too hot for the technician to comfortably hold, it might be so hot that any tools that they insert into it to remove the soot could end up melting.

In this situation, you might have to ask the servicing technician to come back on a different day, as they probably won't have time to wait around for your heater to cool.

Clear out the area around the wood heater

If you and your family often gather round the wood heater on chilly days, then there is probably an assortment of items, including rugs, chairs, ornaments, books and other objects, scattered around this appliance. If possible, you should move these items out of this area before the technician arrives. There are two reasons why you should do this.

The first is that doing this will provide the servicing technician with plenty of space in which to lay out their tools and to do their work. This is important, as they may need to dismantle some parts of the wood heater in order to clean or repair them. If there are random household items in this area, they may find it difficult to find enough space in which to carry out maintenance on these dismantled components.

Secondly, servicing a wood heater can be quite a messy process. It may, for example, result in a lot of soot from the flue being flung onto the floor near the heater. If you leave books or an expensive rug in this area whilst the technician is working, they might end up covered in soot. Given this, they should be moved out of the way prior to the time at which the technician is due to arrive.