About Your Winter Firewood

Preparing the wood supply – the cutting, splitting, stacking and all the hauling that takes place between the stump and the stove – is a formidable amount of work. Considering the effort involved in working up a cordwood pile, you will certainly want to get the most heating benefit possible out of it. This can be accomplished only by properly seasoning your fuel-wood.

A freshly cut tree has a moisture content of about 50 percent, which is a fancy way of saying that one-half the weight of that log you’re carrying is water. This adds up to more than a half ton, or 150 gallons, of H2O per cord. Before the combustible components in a log will burn, all the moisture in the wood must first be converted to water vapor and then driven up the chimney flue--using heat that might otherwise have been put to better use warming your home. This moisture condenses in the chimney, leading to creosote problems while lowering the firebox temperature to a point where it can no longer support full-efficiency secondary combustion. This squanders the heat potential of fuel. This is why it is best to avoid burning green wood whenever possible.

Outdoors, wood dries fastest when the moisture content in the air is lowest; that is, usually between October and May. Wood cut in the autumn, therefore, will be well seasoned by the onset of the following year’s winter heating season. After 12 months of seasoning, the moisture content of the air-dried wood is likely to have dropped to about 20 percent – the driest it will probably get without kiln oven-drying the wood, and quite suitable for burning. Birch and other light hardwoods will season in shorter time, perhaps four to six months, while large, unsplit chunks of oak and elm may require even longer drying times.

The shorter the piece of wood and the more of its surface area exposed to the air, the faster it will dry. The fastest way to dry wood, therefore, is: