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'Building a Fire' - XKCD
(imgs.xkcd.com)
Source: https://xkcd.com/3114/
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Oh, I know. Fire was my hobby as a preteen/young teen, to the point that my mom let me bury a grill so I could burn stuff in it. I was also in the scouts, and won every "start a fire with a single match" competition I was part of.
Last month she had me over to burn a burn pile for her, and she had a 5 gallon canister of diesel that she expected to use all of to start it. I walked around the pile, took 4oz of it, poured it in one spot, then lit a match. The pile was ablaze in about 15 seconds flat and burned out within 2 hours. The diesel wasn't even necessary, I just used it because she had already poured it.
Building fires is my specialty, and there has never been a fire that I've built that would have benefited from the log cabin method. Even the teepee method is unnecessarily complicated.
You don't need structural stability for a fire. In fact, it's usually a hindrance. You want it to collapse in a specific way and be able to stir it up.
That's why you start with a pile of shavings, then add a pile of twigs, then a pile of increasingly bigger sticks up until about 1in in diameter. You don't put anything heavier on until the base fire is caught and has coals.
This is an oversimplification, of course, because you have to account for airflow.
Isn't the log cabin fire just doing that in a more organized and structured way? It allows the tinder to catch in the middle before catching the fuel logs, instead of having to add onto them. And sure, you can always restructure the fire once it's going, but you can also plan it ahead.
Not questioning your ability, rather the opposite. Sometimes structured fires are a standardized way to help people that aren't as skilled or intuitive for fires.
The logs only getting heat from one side is the issue. With the logs being on top of the fire, the fire can reach around them and burn them more completely.
There's probably a bit of an increase in burn time with the log cabin method, but it's going to require more maintenance in the long run. The key to a good fire is to get a solid bed of coals built up quickly.
My experience with the log cabin method reduces the flame and smoke aspects of a bonfire, and keeps it at a steadier, more even burn rather than the quick, higher heat of larger fires. We mostly used it for cooking.
Again, I'm sure that with deeper knowledge of fires someone could get better results. But for consistently made fires that were good for cooking, and didn't burn through fuel as quickly as a teepee fire would, the log cabin method was easiest to consistently reproduce. We'd usually cook using a Dutch oven, so coals were more important than flames, and high flames were often not allowed at the sites we stayed at.
Basically just a lazy teepee, and I mean "lazy" in the most flattering possible sense.
That's a good description of it, actually. It's controlled chaos.
Diesel doesn't even burn that well on its own. For it to do anything, you must've already had a pretty decent fire going without it.
I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable as you, but I do have an actual furnace for heating in the winter, so I have some experience. I can also vouch for structural stability being a hindrance: If I build it too well, there are usually logs or bricks that don't catch fire until a long time later.
Yeah, I rarely use an accelerant when I start a fire. It's a crutch for a bad foundation.