Can You Have a Fire Pit Under a Patio Roof? Clearances & Safety Rules for Perth Homes

Yes, a fire pit can go under a patio roof — but only once you’ve worked out the clearance, the roofing material, and the fuel type together, not separately. Search interest in “fire pit and patio” combinations has been climbing among Perth homeowners, and for good reason: a fire pit is one of the few features that makes an alfresco area usable on a cold Perth winter evening. The catch is that a solid roof overhead changes the physics of the problem. Heat that would simply dissipate into open sky over an unroofed fire pit instead rises straight into your patio’s battens, sheeting, and insulation. Get the placement wrong and you’re not just risking a scorch mark — you’re risking real damage to the roof structure and a genuine fire hazard.

We’ve previously covered the broader question of installing fire pits and barbecues under a patio. This article goes deeper on the one part of that decision that carries the most safety weight: how much clearance you actually need between the flame and the roof above it, and where that figure is supposed to come from.

Why Roof Clearance Is a Safety Issue, Not Just a Design Choice

A fire pit under a roof concentrates heat in a way an open-air fire pit never does. Rising convective heat and radiant heat both get trapped against the underside of the roofing rather than dispersing outward, and that has two separate consequences: damage to the roof itself, and fire risk.

On the damage side, sustained radiant heat can degrade paint coatings, warp or discolour steel sheeting, and — on insulated roof systems — affect the foam core sandwiched inside the panel long before you’d notice any visible flame contact. On the fire-risk side, embers from a wood fire pit or an unexpectedly tall gas flame (from wind, over-filling, or a faulty regulator) can reach combustible roof framing, especially timber battens or fascia, if clearance is too tight. This is exactly why every fire pit manufacturer we could find publishes a minimum clearance figure to overhead structures as a condition of using the product safely — it’s a real engineering constraint, not a liability disclaimer.

What Actually Governs Fire Pit Placement in WA

There is no single Australia-wide number that says “a fire pit must be X millimetres from a patio roof.” Instead, three separate things apply together, and a Perth homeowner needs all three, not just one:

DFES treats a patio as open air, not as shelter. The Department of Fire and Emergency Services is explicit that a roofed but open-sided structure doesn’t take you out of open-air fire rules. Its own guidance states that “the open air is defined as anywhere not fully enclosed by a building or structure”, and specifically lists “undercover areas such as patios, pergolas and huts which are open or partially open to the weather” as areas where you cannot use an open flame during a Total Fire Ban. In practice, that means putting a roof over your fire pit does not exempt you from WA’s seasonal fire restrictions, and only enclosed gas appliances with a controlled flame are treated differently on a ban day.

AS/NZS 2918:2018 is the relevant Australian installation standard — but it’s written for solid-fuel heating appliances generally, not fire pits specifically. This standard, referenced by the National Construction Code, sets out how clearances to combustible material are meant to be determined and tested for domestic solid-fuel appliances, and it underpins the clearance logic that indoor wood heater installers work to. It does not hand you a single ready-made figure for an outdoor fire pit sitting under a patio roof, and we could not find a public source that publishes an AS 2918 clearance table specific to that scenario. This is the part we’d flag for confirmation rather than guess at: the exact clearance a WA-licensed gas fitter or installer would sign off on for your specific fire pit, roof height, and construction depends on assessment against this standard, not a number we can responsibly print in a blog post.

The manufacturer’s own installation instructions are what you actually have to follow. Every legitimate fire pit or fire table comes with a clearance spec from its manufacturer, and these vary by model, fuel type, and burner output. To give a sense of the range rather than a rule you should apply directly: Australian manufacturer EcoSmart Fire specifies a minimum 1,829mm (72in) ceiling clearance from the top of the burner to any fixed overhang on its gas fire pits and fire tables, plus 610mm side clearance to fixed furniture and 2,000mm clearance to anything that can move in the wind, such as overhanging branches. US manufacturer HPC Fire publishes 84in overhead clearance and 36in side clearance for gas burners up to 200,000 BTU, rising to no overhead structure permitted at all above that output. These figures are specific to those manufacturers’ own products and are not interchangeable — they illustrate why the clearance for your fire pit has to come from its own installation manual, not a generic rule of thumb.

Gas vs Wood Fire Pits: Not the Same Conversation

The manufacturer clearance figures above are for gas appliances, which is not a coincidence. Gas fire pits have a controlled, predictable flame height and no embers, which is why manufacturers can publish a defined clearance spec and stand behind it. Wood-burning fire pits produce airborne embers and a flame height that varies with how the fire is loaded and how much wind is around — variables that don’t reduce to a fixed clearance number the way a gas burner’s output does. Combined with DFES treating a patio as open air rather than shelter, a wood fire pit positioned directly under a patio roof is a materially harder case to make safe than a gas unit, and it’s worth treating that as a genuinely different decision rather than assuming the same clearance logic applies to both.

Colorbond and Insulated Roof Panels: Different Materials, Different Considerations

The roofing material overhead also matters. BlueScope’s own published fire-performance information for COLORBOND® steel covers its non-combustibility and its testing under AS 3959 for bushfire-prone areas, but we could not find any BlueScope guidance addressing clearance from a radiant heat source like a fire pit sitting directly beneath a sheet of Colorbond — that’s a genuine information gap, not a green light, and it’s worth confirming with the manufacturer or your installer for your specific setup.

Insulated panel roofing such as Cooldek and Solarspan is a different case again. These panels sandwich an expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam core between two steel skins, and Stratco’s own Ignis fire certification for Cooldek describes that core as having “low Fire Hazard Properties” when bonded to the non-combustible steel sheets. That certification, as far as we could verify, relates to ember and bushfire-attack resistance rather than sustained close-range radiant heat from a fire feature installed underneath the panel on an ongoing basis. Given the core material is a treated foam rather than solid steel, we’d treat an insulated panel roof as the more conservative case of the two, and recommend confirming directly with Stratco or your installer before placing a fire pit — gas or wood — anywhere near the clearance limit under this type of roofing.

Our Recommendation

There isn’t a single safe number we can hand you for “fire pit to patio roof” clearance, and we’d rather say that plainly than print a figure that doesn’t hold up for your specific fire pit, roof height, and roofing material. What we can tell you is the process that gets you a real answer: start from your fire pit’s manufacturer installation manual for its stated overhead clearance, confirm that figure is achievable under your actual roof height and construction, and treat DFES total fire ban rules as applying to your patio the same as they would to open ground. If you’re planning a new patio with a fire pit in mind, or retrofitting one under an existing roof, talk to us before you buy the fire pit or fix its position — we can confirm what clearance your chosen model needs against your specific roof height, framing, and material, and make sure the finished result is one you can actually use safely on a winter night.