Frequently Asked Questions

For most gardens it's a 19 to 25 inch smokeless pit, or a plain 30 inch steel bowl if you don't mind smoke. The smokeless pits cost two to three times as much per inch of diameter and buy you one thing: you stop moving your chair. If that is the part of a fire you hate, it is worth it; if it isn't, raw diameter buys more warmth per dollar than engineering does.

They are much less smoky, not smoke-free, and the difference depends almost entirely on the wood. A double-wall pit draws air up between its two skins, preheats it and feeds it back in above the fire, which burns off most of the smoke particles. That secondary burn only works once the fire is hot and the wood is dry. Wet wood smokes in a smokeless pit exactly as it does in a bucket.

A genuinely good plain steel fire bowl starts around forty dollars and a 30 inch one lands near a hundred. Smokeless pits start around a hundred and fifty and the premium brands run three hundred to six hundred. Our honest read is that the cheapest sensible full-size pit and the most expensive one produce a very similar fire; the money buys less smoke, thicker metal and a brand.

Propane if your site has a wood-fire ban, if you want it on and off with a knob and no ash, or if you take it to campgrounds. Wood if you want the most radiant heat per dollar and the fire itself is the point. A 58,000 BTU propane bowl looks impressive and still delivers less radiant warmth than a well-built wood fire of the same diameter.

Roughly: 19 to 22 inches suits three or four chairs, 25 to 30 inches suits four to six, and 36 inches and up is for a big open garden and eight or more. Then check clearance before you check diameter — Smokey Bear's guidance is to clear at least a 10-foot area around the site, stay at least 15 feet from tents, vegetation and low branches, and keep vertical clearance of at least three times the flame height.

Often yes, with conditions: a raised pit on legs or a stand, a fire pit mat underneath, and a spark screen on top. A propane bowl is the lower-risk choice because there are no flying embers. A large open wood bowl sitting directly on timber is a straight no. Check your decking manufacturer's own guidance too, because composite decking can scorch at lower temperatures than timber.

Seasoned hardwood — oak, ash, hickory, maple, birch. The thing that matters more than species is moisture: the EPA says wood burns best below 20 percent moisture content, and that under-20 figure is also what makes a smokeless pit behave smokelessly. Never burn treated, painted or coated wood, plywood, particle board, driftwood or household trash; the EPA lists all of those as things to keep off a fire.

The EPA's guidance is to season wood for at least six months, stored outdoors, off the ground, with only the top covered — wrapping the sides traps moisture in the stack. Six months is a minimum rather than a target; dense hardwood split large can take a year or more. A thirty-dollar moisture meter answers the question for your actual stack rather than in theory.

Drown, stir, drown, feel. Pour water on until the hissing stops, stir the water right through the embers with a shovel, keep adding water until everything is cool, then hover the back of your hand over the ashes to check. Dirt or sand alone does not do it — it insulates embers rather than killing them, and they can still be alive hours later.

If the pit is anywhere near decking, fencing, dry grass or overhanging branches, yes. A screen stops embers leaving the bowl, which is the actual fire-spread risk from an open pit. It does nothing about smoke, so it is not a cheap route to a smokeless fire — and you have to lift it every time you add wood, which is why the ones with a handle and poker included are worth the few extra dollars.

They do different jobs. A patio heater warms people — a reflector pushes heat down over a seating circle and nobody has to face it. A fire pit makes a focal point that everyone turns toward and that warms whichever side of you is pointing at it. If the goal is to extend the season on a deck, buy the heater. If the goal is for people to sit outside together, buy the pit.

The covered-space question usually decides it before price does. Electric infrared produces no combustion products at all, so it is the right answer for a covered porch, a garage or a balcony with a roof. Propane has far more reach and needs no outlet, so it wins in open air. Running cost varies by region, but electric is usually dearer per hour.

Electric infrared heaters are. Propane heaters generally are not, unless the manufacturer specifically rates the model for it, because combustion in a partly enclosed space produces carbon monoxide. The CPSC reports that more than 200 people in the United States die every year from accidental non-fire carbon monoxide poisoning linked to consumer products. If you use any fuel-burning heater in an enclosed space, use a CO alarm.

Size to the space you actually want warm, not to the whole house, and treat the square-footage figure on the box as a best case. An oversized stove is worse than an undersized one: you end up damping it down to avoid cooking yourself out, and a damped-down stove burns dirty and lays creosote in the flue. A blower matters more than people expect, because it is what moves heat past the room the stove is in.

It means the heater was independently tested to meet the federal emission limit. Under the 2020 standard that is 2.0 grams per hour tested with crib wood, or 2.5 grams per hour tested with cord wood; stoves certified under the earlier 2015 standard met 4.5 grams per hour. The EPA notes that cord wood — ordinary firewood — is the better measure of how a stove will actually perform in a home.

It is better at one specific thing: the chimney lifts smoke above head height, which matters a lot in a small walled garden or anywhere windy. The trade is that a chiminea heats a directional arc in front of its mouth rather than a 360-degree circle, so your seating has to be arranged for it. Clay radiates a softer, longer heat than steel but cracks if overloaded or left to freeze wet.

No, and we say so on every page. We do not own these units and we do not run a test lab. Every pick is reasoned from the maker's published specifications read off the listing on a dated visit, the live price, and an honest value read. Safety figures come from the EPA, the CPSC and Smokey Bear, cited on the page. If you want a site that claims to have burned twenty fire pits, this isn't it.

Because they expire on purpose. Prices come from a daily Amazon check and carry the date they were pulled. If that check stops for more than 48 hours, every number on the site vanishes and the buttons fall back to "check price on Amazon" instead. A missing price is a design decision — the failure mode is silence, not a stale claim.