Is it dangerous to burn painted, stained, or pressure-treated wood?

What's actually in that smoke

Pressure-treated lumber is preserved with chemicals designed to kill insects and fungus, and burning doesn't destroy them — it puts them in the air. Older treated wood, the greenish deck boards common before the mid-2000s, used chromated copper arsenate, which sends arsenic up in the smoke and leaves it concentrated in the ash sitting in your firebox. Newer treatments swapped the arsenic for copper compounds that are still nothing you want to breathe. Painted and stained scrap adds its own cocktail — old paint can carry lead, and modern finishes give off irritant fumes no fireplace was designed to handle.

"It's just a few scraps" — still no

The version we hear most often isn't somebody burning an old deck. It's tossing a handful of offcuts from a weekend project onto the fire because they're dry and they're right there. The dose is smaller but the chemistry is identical, and some of it stays behind — as residue on the firebox walls, in the flue, and in ash that too often ends up spread on a garden. Ash from treated or painted wood should never go anywhere near a vegetable bed.

If you heat with wood, keep a hard line at the woodpile: anything painted, stained, glued, or stamped with a treatment tag goes to the county transfer station, not into the stove.

What to burn instead

Seasoned hardwood — oak, hickory, maple, locust, all abundant in these mountains — split, stacked off the ground, and dried for a year. It burns hotter and cleaner than construction scrap ever will, with far less creosote. And if your chimney has a few seasons of mystery fuel in its history, a sweep and inspection before the next burning season is cheap insurance. Call (828) 545-0525 to get on the schedule.