If you have a fire pit in your backyard, you have likely been caught off guard with last-minute plans to spend the evening next to the fire, just to realize that you have run out of firelighters; leaving you to rely on your caveman instincts to get the fire going. This is undeniably a very time consuming and frustrating experience. The question stands: How do you light a fire when life throws you a curveball?

Here are a few practical ways to get your fire going quickly and efficiently when you’ve run out of firelighters:

Egg boxes:

After having delicious bacon and eggs for breakfast, consider keeping the empty egg carton for later – you never know when it might come in handy. You can use it for more than kiddies’ crafts, you can even use it to light a fire.

Take the egg box, make holes in the cardboard part that sticks up and pour cooking oil in the sections that previously held the eggs. Light the small pieces of the carton next to the holes you made. The oil will take light, creating a chimney effect, because air will pour through the holes that you made. This will feed oxygen to the flame, thus letting it burn brighter.

Pumice stone:

A pumice stone is a piece of volcanic rock one uses to scrape and smoothen your heels with. It can also work effectively as a firelighter for a very long time.

Put a pumice stone in some diesel for a couple of minutes; it will absorb the diesel and allow you to start your fire quickly. The great thing about this stone is that you can use it again. Just take the stone out of the ashes once your fire has burned out and put it back in a jar with diesel in it.

Use a candle:

With Eskom being so unpredictable and load shedding striking at all times, you definitely have tons of candles on hand. We’re not asking you to ruin your favourite set of date night candles to light your fire, all you need is one or two long candles.

Break or cut a long candle into a few pieces without cutting through the wick. Create a few small candles by pulling the wax away from the wick. Next, you need to stack your wood and place these small candles inside of the stack – Arrange it in such a way that the flames created by the lit candles would be able to reach the wood. If you have some newspaper laying around, stuff some of it inside the stack of wood as well.

Next time you’ve run out of firelighters, make life easier for yourself by using one of these convenient fire lighting methods.