One of the maintenance tasks that comes part and parcel with owning and using an open fireplace or a combustion heater as your primary heat source is the job of keeping it clean. This will be a more difficult and challenging task depending on the type of wood you burn. If you are in the habit of burning wood that is sappy or not completely dry there will be a lot more smoke and creosote build up than if you burn properly aged wood.
When a fire is involved, regardless of whether it is a contained fire or an uncontained destructive fire, there is going to be some kind of leftover waste. This will come in the form of ash, smoke or soot as well as assorted other gases with variable levels of each leaving you with the task of performing the occasional fire damage cleanup.
This may not be a task that concerns you too much given that some people believe the bricks around a fireplace should have that soot-charred look about it. When performing the removal of soot you should fully understand that attacking it from the outside with a liquid cleaner will not work. Soot is a carbon-based product and will stain with the slightest moisture. Try to remove as much of the soot as possible by dry means with soot sponges and a vacuum cleaner. When you have cleaned as much as possible from the bricks use a citrus degreaser mixed with warm water and then scrub this into the bricks with a stiff brush.
Those who own a combustion heater may be faced with the problem of having to clean soot off the glass. There is a simple method that many people use and swear by and that is to dip a damp balled up newspaper into the (cold) ashes of the fire and then use this to scrub the soot from the glass. If the layers of soot are too thick to effectively use the ashes treatment, take a razor blade and strip off the layers until you are left with the last stubborn spots. You can then try the newspaper and ashes treatment.
Keeping the fireplace or the combustion heater is a job that shouldn’t be required to be done very often but it should be performed to keep the fireplace or heater functioning at its optimum level.