Proper maintenance of tent stoves ensures safety, efficiency, and longevity during your outdoor adventures. And whether you’re a novice camper breaking in your new stove or a seasoned camper venturing out for winter camping in your hot tent, routine tent stove maintenance is a must. Cleaning the creosote, making repairs, and lubricating stuck hinges – this guide explains it all. Read on to learn proper tent stove maintenance along with extra tips and tricks to enhance its performance.

The Importance of Tent Stove Maintenance

Maintaining your tent stove should be an integral part of tent maintenance. This is especially true if you use your tent for winter camping or backcountry camping. The last thing you need is to discover a major issue with your camping setup and main source of heat way out in the wilderness. Plus, regular tent stove maintenance is simply an important part of tent stove safety and offers a host of other benefits.

• Helps it run efficiently: Keeps a warmer tent with minimal fire upkeep.
• Burns through less firewood: A well-maintained tent stove will burn hot and consume the least amount of wood, which means your cords of wood will go further.
• Reduces creosote buildup: Tent stove maintenance can reduce the buildup of creosote (a toxic by-product created from burning firewood containing tar) that restricts airflow in pipes and causes tent stove joints to become stuck.

So, while it’s a dirty job, take the time to maintain your tent stove, including cleaning the stove pipes to making repairs and lubricating joints. It will make your camping experience go smoothly and ensure a warm tent all winter long.

Tent Stove Maintenance: Cleaning

An important step in tent stove maintenance is cleaning. Cleaning your tent stove and removing harmful, toxic creosote buildup is a vital safety measure for a multitude of reasons. Wood that is not dry or properly seasoned can create even more creosote buildup, which can restrict airflow and even cause smoke backdraft into the tent itself.

This can create a dangerous situation, especially when caught unaware and sleeping at night. Using a smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector can alert you, but you don’t want that smoke smelling up your tent interior anyway.

Clean the Stove Pipes

Cleaning your tent stove pipes is extremely important. Why? Because if you don’t clean the stove pipes routinely, the ash and soot can build up, restricting airflow and making your fire inefficient and difficult to manage.

Obviously, to get started cleaning your stove pipes, you’ll want to collapse and take apart each section of the tent stove chimney. Once the chimney is disassembled into its individual sections, clean each pipe separately.

To clean each section, stand it up in a bucket and scrub the insides with a chimney ash brush, scraping off all the loose creosote flakes. The bucket will act as a catch-all, keeping your workspace or the area ash-free and clean.

Want to reduce your cleaning time? Check out this smart tent stove maintenance hack by Rob Pelton, using a drill and soft bristle wire brush.

Clean the Stove Box and False Bottom

Cleaning and maintaining tent stove pipes is your top priority. However, the tent stove box will need maintenance and cleaning also to prevent surface stains within the burn chamber. How? Because wood ash is highly acidic, which means it can trap moisture inside the stove box.

Start by removing the false bottom (for cleaning later) and scrub down the inside with a wire brush. Once you’ve done that, bring over your shop vac or vacuum cleaner (we recommend something you don’t mind getting ash all over, of course) and suck out everything you just scraped off. Feel free to repeat, if necessary.

To clean the false bottom surface, scrub using a wire brush, removing any ash or rust. Take extra effort to really get into those air holes, clearing them thoroughly to improve your airflow and help make your tent stove run as efficiently as possible.

Be sure to perform basic daily tent stove maintenance. Using the metal coal bucket, scrape out the ashes once a day. Again, this is simply good advice for running any fire efficiently, at home or within a tent stove.

Clean the Joints and Hinges

Applying lubrication to joints and hinges is the last step in tent stove maintenance. But first, you’ll need to clean them. So give these areas a hard brushing, removing rust and areas that show corrosion to prevent these handy hinged and folding areas of your transportable tent stove from seizing up.

What are these areas?

Focus on the folding legs’ pivot joints, the door hinge and handle pivot.

A couple of extra tips:

• Don’t forcefully pry open stuck joints and hinges – it could damage the surrounding areas
• Use a smaller wire brush to clean deeper into the crevices of joints and hinges.

Tent Stove Maintenance: Making Repairs

After you start your tent stove maintenance routine with cleaning, it’s time to make repairs. Looking your tent stove over, inspect it for any missing parts, seized joints, or just general worn and damaged components. As a good rule of thumb, these repairs can be made between seasons, either before or after installing it in your tent.

Inspect for any deformed areas, especially in the metal stove pipe components and their connection points. Transporting a heavy tent stove can cause dents and deformed sections. Use pliers to bend deformed areas back. This ensures the stove pipes fit properly and are good and snug to open the airflow and prevent any backdrafts or smoke from escaping into your tent.

Inspect the air vent too, to ensure it closes properly and pivot points have not seized up.

Tent Stove Maintenance: Applying Lubrication

After you’ve taken time to clean and make repairs, it’s time to address all those stiff joints and other areas by applying lubrication to your tent stove. This important final step in tent stove maintenance will ensure that critical areas and regions of your stove perform optimally every year and don’t seize or jam up.

Types of lubrication oils:

Choose a nontoxic lubrication that is non-petroleum (fire-safe) and doesn’t put out any noxious fumes when it burns off your hot tent stove. If you have an axe or field hatchet (chances are you do, having a wood-burning tent stove and all) you could use the same blade oil.

So where do you apply lubrication on a tent stove?

Generally, you want to lubricate moveable parts that experience friction (whether during daily operations or packing it in for the season). Consider lubricating these joints and areas:

• Leg pivot points
• Door hinge and handle pivot
• Air vent pivot

When applying oil lubrication to your tent stove’s joints and such, you don’t have to be delicate about it. In fact, you can be heavy-handed with the oil, ensuring it gets into all the tight nooks and crannies.

How Often to Perform Tent Stove Maintenance

Regular tent stove maintenance is an important part of tent stove safety and helps it run efficiently, keeping you toasty warm inside the tent without burning quickly through firewood. But how often do you need to perform tent stove maintenance? That depends.

As a general rule, you should set aside extra time for tent stove maintenance once a year, at minimum. However, consider maintaining your tent stove more frequently (like every 20 hours of burn time) if, for example, you use it regularly in a hot tent for winter camping. For winter camping, some recommend cleaning as often as once a week, especially if you keep your fire going full-time throughout the day.

Understanding how to burn an efficient wood fire in your tent stove is paramount. Burning your tent stove hot for at least one hour per day will help remove creosote and keep it from forming. And, depending on how frequently you use your stove, you should clean a spark arrestor every one or two days to prevent it from clogging.

A List of Gear for Tent Stove Maintenance

• Heat-Resistant Gloves and Mask: Pick yourself up a pair of heat-resistant gloves (leather gloves you already own for loading firewood work in a pinch too) along with a mask to prevent breathing in any ash particles.
• Vacuum or shop vac: Sucks up all the ash, rust, creosote – whatever! – with a rugged or old vacuum or shop vac you don’t mind getting dirty.
• Coal Bucket: A smart tent stove accessory to have for daily ash cleanings is a coal bucket or fireproof bucket to scrape ashes into to maintain your fire’s efficiency.
• Wire Brushes: Some tent stove kits (like the Winnerwell Woodlander) already come with an ash brush for cleaning the pipes. But if not, grab yourself a wire brush. A harder BBQ grill brush works nicely to scrub off rust and clean the interior of your tent stove. And a smaller wire brush is perfect for cleaning crevices of hinges.
• Pliers: When performing tent stove maintenance, a set of pliers is a wise tool to have to remove any stuck components or bend back edges of misshapen stove pipes.
• Oil: A nontoxic, non-petroleum oil for lubricating is recommended. This ensures no noxious fumes. Already have blade oil for your axe or hatchet? Double its use – that works well too!
• Tent Stove Bag: When your tent stove is not in use, safely store it away. Some tent stove manufacturers offer a portable bag for long-term storage and transportation to your campsite. However, bag or no bag, be sure to store your tent stove in a cool, dry place, preventing imperfections and stains along the burn chamber. Take care to avoid storing your tent stove near any harsh chemicals or other household cleaners, as it could potentially stain the tent stove’s exterior finish (which would create more maintenance and cleanup work for you).

Maintain Your Tent Stove and More

Just follow these tent stove maintenance tips for a warm and safe when winter camping

Prepping your tent for the upcoming season? Discover more tips for cleaning, repairing, and maintaining your entire campsite:

• How to Maintain and Clean Canvas Bell Tent
• Retreating a Canvas Tent
• Canvas Tent Repair Kits
• How to Clean and Repair Tent Zippers
• Protecting Your Tent During Long-Term Use