Quick, Cheap and Easy Wood Pellets Fireplace

You have a fireplace but no place to store logs or no way to obtain them ?

No problem. With this instructable and a bag of wood pellets, you'll very soon enjoy a warm fire.

I apologize in advance for any translation mistake : English is not my mother language. Feel encouraged to correct me in the comments.

Materials

I made this using only salvaged items.

• One fan protection grid. Beware, some fan models use "cages" (with parallel wires) rather than this case of grid. Holes must be small enough to keep pellets inside.
• One metal can.
• One foot to stabilize the fan protection and level it above the ground to let the air pass. I chose a fire-pit utensil I had (made to put pans above the ember) but any metal cylinder (like a bigger can) could do the trick.

Tool

There's no mistake to the title, you only need one tool : a driller with a big drill.

The only things to do is to drill holes in the can

• in its bottom, as shown in the picture of this step,
• all around the can as it can be seen on picture of preceding step.

This drilled can will be central chimney of our "pellets oven". It's aim is to bring air in the center of the fire.

To ease can side drilling insert a log or an empty plastic bottle inside the can to stabilize it. Start drilling slowly to fix the drill on the convex surface then accelerate.

BEWARE DURING THIS OPERATION : drilled holes will have very sharp edges. Wear heavy leather gloves !

To prepare you fire, put the can in the center of the fan protection and fill around it with pellets.

1. Light a fire inside the can using tiny branches (pic 1)
2. Fire inside the can gets stronger (pic 2)
3. Fire reaches the pellets (pic 3)
4. You're good !

Fire will spread among pellets until they are all burn. Use a metallic bowl to refill fire with pellets from above.

OK, it's not as beautiful as a log fire but it warms quite good even if you must refill pellets more often than logs.

When fire is extinguished, just shake fan protection to drop the -very few - ashes. Clean can inside if needed and you can just go back to the first line of this step to light a new fire.