When you work on your fireplace, you wanna make sure you do it in the fall or in the spring. Most likely you'll want to do it in the fall because that's the season just before you get ready to use it. You don't want to work on it typically in the summer because it's really hot and you can have bugs and all these things come into your house. Fall is a really great time, especially on a cool day like 40 degrees. It's just cold enough for the bugs to not be awake and active and be able to get in here and work on your fireplace and get it prepared for the upcoming cold months.

All right, so now to take this off, what you need to do first is you need to remove this bottom vent. Now mine is just held on by a magnet, so I just need to pull out. And then in order to get the rest of this to remove completely, you don't have to take this off for the glass, but if you need to get this off completely, then you'll need to either remove some screws on either side to be able to get the pins out. Or in this case, I've got this little lever here on mine that I could just pull in and then the bottom part comes out.

To remove the top vent all I have to do is lift up and then pull out. If this doesn't come out easily, there might be some screws holding it on, and you might need to look for that and remove the screws before you can get that top part out. Now to get this glass panel off, there should be a couple of clamps at the bottom that can release and then you'll pull out on the glass, and then you'll be able to lift it up and remove it. If your glass on your fireplaces is just dirty on the outside, you can use just Windex or vinegar and water to clean it. But a lot of times with gas, fireplaces or fireplaces in general, you'll have soot build up on the inside.

You'll need to take the glass off so you can get access to the inside of the glass, and then what you want to do is you want to take either a razor blade or some other cleaning solution that's designed specifically to clean glass on fireplaces. To use a razor blade to clean the inside of the glass. It's a really easy process, but the biggest thing is you want to make sure the blade is at a very shallow angle. You just want the blade to ride across the top of the glass, and you want to scrape off the soot that's built on top of the glass itself.

If you get too steep at an angle or if you get a corner dug in too much, then it's going to scratch the glass. So you need to be really careful when you do this, but this is a really quick way of getting soot cleaned off the inside of your fireplace glass. Bugs tend to find their way inside of these fireplaces. Now you should have a screen that's on the outside that prevents most of the bugs from coming in. But a lot of times some will end up finding their way in, especially like wasps or things that are trying to net.

It's also a good time to clean out the media in the bottom of the fireplace because what will happen is a lot of times they'll come in and they'll die and they'll just land on the bottom of the fireplace. So every couple of years you might want to just completely redo all the media that's in the bottom of the base and it's a really cheap, easy solution. This stuff is not very expensive vermiculite you can get a bag of that for not very much money. Same thing for lava rock and any of the other media that you want to put on the bottom. You also might want to dress up the bottom by putting in fireplace glass that is typically found in a fire pit. If you want to make your fireplace look a little bit more modern.

You should also think about cleaning out around the fire box. Dust and dirt will collect in the bottom and on the top of the fireplace... More so the bottom. But by cleaning this out, it will help prevent you from having dusty air when it comes time to use the fireplace, especially if you have a fan installed in the back that recycles the air around the firebox to heat up your space. Then you'll want to make sure that this is cleaned out, it's dust free, so that way, all that dust just doesn't fly back into your living space. When it's time to use it.

You will want to be careful though, and make sure you don't hit anything like a gas line. There's a lot of electrical wires underneath and there's also some sharp edges from metal. So take your time, be careful with this. Using a vacuum is a really great way to clean out all the big debris. And if you really want to get it sparkling clean, then I would just take a damp washcloth, make sure it's just damp and not wet and then take your time and kind of go over the base and go over all the dusty spots. Avoid the electrical wires and the electrical connections and the gas line if possible.

It's also a good time to check and make sure you don't have any leaks in your gas line before you use your fireplace. The easy way to do this is take a bowl of water and dishwashing soap and mix that together and then kind of brush it over the lines over the connection points and see if any bubbles form. If any bubbles form, you'll know you have a leak and that needs to be fixed before you use your fireplace. But this is again, a really quick, easy way to make sure that everything is safe before it's time to use it.

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