How to Start a Charcoal Grill (Without Lighter Fluid!)

pouring out lit charcoal from chimney starter

I love to grill and wanted to share with you the best way to light a charcoal grill. For many, many years prior to this I’d just spray a ton of lighter fluid on the coals and try to light it. It wouldn’t stay lit for more than a few seconds, and even if you managed to not spray any outside of the BBQ, the fumes still reeked of it.

My favorite new way to light a charcoal grill does not require lighter fluid. There’s a few rules we stick with too. Here’s everything you’ll need to easily light a charcoal grill:

Why shouldn’t you use lighter fluid?

The best way to cook using coals, in my opinion, is to avoid lighter fluid. Lighter fluid is great if you’re trying to create a roaring fire that lasts only a few seconds, but the main reason I avoid it is because it affects the flavor of the food.

Then there’s the noxious smell. When I smell BBQs going on in the neighborhood it’s always immediately apparent if the person is burning fluid. I want my backyard to smell like smoke and grilled food, not like lighter fluid!

And finally lighter fluid is another thing you have to keep buying, that you don’t necessarily need to achieve perfectly lit coals.

Why I use a chimney starter to light charcoal

Chimney starters, or charcoal chimneys are a great tool to help you easily light charcoal. They look like large steel mugs with a huge handle. There’s an open grate on the bottom, a fully open top, and strategically placed holes throughout to encourage airflow in the proper direction.

Heat from coals rise upward, and this contraption helps to concentrate all that heat in the metal cylinder which helps heat coals inside the chamber, instead of just escaping into the air.

charcoal burning in chimney starter

You can score a chimney starter for around $15-25 dollars, so it’s not too pricey. They are durable and reusable. Mine’s rusted over from use over many, many years but still works as well as it did on day one.

Choosing the right type of charcoal

bag of natural hardwood lump charcoal

Since we’re going out of our way to avoid lighter fluid already, I purposely avoid buying any briquettes that have lighter fluid in them. These are typically marked with something like “easy light.”

And I also like to avoid any charcoal briquettes to ensure there are no fillers in the coal. To form briquettes, fillers and binders are used to make these shapes, and I don’t want any of that burning near me, or seeping into the food I eat. They have the benefit of uniformity which helps all of them heat evenly at the same time, but it’s not worth the tradeoff to me.

holding charcoal with bbq tongs

I like to use natural lump charcoal. Lately I’ve been using Kamado Joe coals since they stock it at my home store. Natural lump charcoal tends to create less ash than briquettes. Less expensive ones like the ones at your local megamart can often be a mix of various wood species, and vary greatly with large and small chunks. If you go this route, you may need a small hatchet to break the larger pieces (fun, but can be dangerous) down both so it fits in the chimney starter and so all the coals can heat more evenly. But it’s worth it.

How to light charcoals step by step

  1. Clean out your grill
leftover ash in bbq grill

Pour out any old charcoal from your previous grilling session, and all the charcoal dust down there. This stuff can kick up during cooking and stick to your food. You don’t need to clean the grill grate yet.

  1. Setup the grill and fill the chimney starter
chimney starter with toilet paper roll and coals

Place the grate back on the grill and place the chimney starter on top–this provides lets air flow up through the bottom of the chimney starter compared it it being more restricted just placed on the ground. Place a toilet paper or paper towel cardboard core in the center (or folded cardboard) to create a gap in the center, then add charcoal to the chimney. For a typical grilling session for 2-4 people I like to fill the chimney about 80% of the way. Leaving a little bit of extra room helps with rearranging the coals later.

How you arrange coals in the chimney starter is important. A fire needs steady airflow to burn so if there’s no airflow in the chimney starter, you’ll have trouble getting a large enough flame to be self-sustaining. I’ve found that tiny charcoal chips often clog and block airflow at the bottom of my chimney starter. So use the tiny chips sparingly, or save them for later to add to already lit coals.

Even large coals can block airflow if they’re all perfectly fitted to each other, so carefully arrange the coals to have vertical airflow paths in multiple spots. The cardboard paper towel core helps achieve this.

  1. Place starters under the chimney
paper with cooking oil

Dryer lint is a popular tool, but this is good only to help with the initial lighting–the burn time is extremely short. I like to use 1-2 sheets of balled up newspaper with about 1 tsp of cooking oil in it. The paper lights easily, and the oil helps it burn a little longer.

Weber lighter cubes

You can also buy those little compressed fire starter blocks sold at BBQ or camping stores–the ones from Weber look like wax ice cubes, and there are other ones that look like compressed wood chips. These can be a great way to easily light your coals.

chimney with starter material below
  1. Light the chimney starter
lightning chimney starter with match

A BBQ lighter helps with the reach, and helps you relight later if needed, without getting your hand too close to the heat source. You can also use matches with tongs for extra reach.

  1. Fan the flames and make sure the coals get hot enough
fanning flames under chimney starter

You can increase the burn rate and fire size by gently fanning the underside of the chimney starter. I like to do this with my handy dandy electric fan, but a manual fan works wonders too.

  1. Add more starter and relight if necessary
smoke coming out of chimney starter

The initial burn of starter under the chimney will produce white smoke. The coals need to burn hot enough and long enough so that they stay lit. This part can be tricky because the time and effort required can vary greatly. There needs to be enough starter underneath, burning for long enough to bring the temperature of the coals up enough to burn and sustain the burn. So if all your starter burns out before the coals ignite, you need to add more starter and keep it burning.

Once the coals get hot enough to ignite the white smoke mostly goes away and becomes an orange flame.

flames in charcoal chimney

To help ensure coals get lit, I like to keep feeding more material under the chimney starter, or through the round holes on the side as it is burning, to avoid having to relight it. I like feeding in crumpled recycled paper, cardboard cores of toilet paper or paper towel rolls, or recycled paper bags. Cardboard can work well but there is glue in corrugated cardboard so I try to avoid this.

If your coals struggle to burn, ensure there are multiple vertical pathways of airflow from the bottom of the chimney starter to the top. Common issues that cause this are filling the chimney starter with a ton of small charcoal chips and dust, or putting way too much paper/starter at the bottom that blocks airflow. You may even need to rearrange large charcoal chunks to allow better airflow.

  1. Pour out coals when they’re hot enough (all partially white)
pouring out lit charcoal from chimney starter

Sometimes there are blazing flames, but it takes a few minutes of this before the coals are ready. A blazing flame can be a good sign that the coals caught fire and will maintain the flame. But the coals are ready when there’s at least a little bit of white on most of your coals. Sometimes the top ones lag behind on getting lit and I like to use a pair of long stainless steel BBQ tongs to rearrange the coals in there so the blacker coals are moved down a bit, or in hotter spots.

Now pour out your coals into the bottom of your BBQ. Your coals will continue to burn a little, and once they’ve all turned white you can spread them out over your grill and start cooking.

  1. Clean the grates and cook!
scrubbing bbq grates with cleaning tool

I like to put the cooking grate on now and close the lid so the grate heats up for a few minutes. Leave the vent holes on your bbq open. Once the grates are hot, it’s easier to scrape down to clean the grates with a grill cleaning tool. I use the scraper to get off large bits, then do a final pass with a wet or oiled paper towel to pick up the rest of the bits on the grates.

The coals may remain super hot for 5-10 minutes so make sure its not too hot before putting your food on the grill. I found that if I can’t hold my hand about 3-5 inches above the cooking surface for more than 1 second, it is much too hot to cook things that require 10-15 minutes of grilling. However you might be fine with quick cooking items like hot dogs, thinly sliced veggies, or similar items.

Some of my favorite recipes to do on a charcoal grill

5 yakitori skewers on a konro grill

How do you light charcoal and keep it burning?

A common issue with lighting charcoal is that the fire goes out too soon. There are a few things you can do to help alleviate this. First is to keep the coals closer together so more of the heat transfers to other coals instead of escaping into the air. Using a chimney starter like in our method above also achieves this.

Second, you need to keep feeding the fire. If the paper or oil you use in step 3 above isn’t enough, keep feeding the fire with more starter material.

Third, to make the fire grow larger and hotter, you can fan the fire as its burning. A hotter fire can help coals reach the point where they stay lit.

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