07 Mastering the Art and Science of Firewood: From Gathering to Efficient Burning

Join our knowledgeable host as they guide you through the nuances of choosing the perfect wood for your fireplace or stove. Learn the secrets behind identifying hardwoods and softwoods, and discover why each type plays a crucial role in your heating and cooking experiences. Our host shares practical insights on managing heat levels, offering tips on adjusting airflow, utilizing dampers, and achieving the ideal burn for different purposes, be it heating your home or preparing a sumptuous meal.

Understand the science behind the drying process and gain valuable knowledge on using moisture meters to ensure your wood is ready for prime burning.  Learn why the type of wood matters, and how its moisture content and seasoning time affect the resulting fire's efficiency and duration. Discover the science behind why bark may not be your ideal choice for a hot, efficient fire, and the surprising role humidity plays in your wood-burning efforts.

Have you ever considered the varying burning characteristics of hardwood and softwood? Or pondered the impact of your chosen firewood on the heat output and cooking potential of your stove? We're going to get into all of it - discussing everything from the best methods for gathering and storing firewood to the importance of using dry wood for an efficient, smokeless fire. We'll also address the issues that arise when burning wet wood, and why it's absolutely vital to let your wood dry out before burning. Whether you're a novice or a seasoned wood-burner, this episode promises a wealth of knowledge on all things firewood.  Our host shares personal anecdotes and practical tips, making this podcast the go-to resource for anyone seeking to elevate their understanding of firewood. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to the cabin Fire. Another firewood day, october 30th, so I'm pushing it here, trying to get some. Well, at least get this shed full of the stuff that I've got scattered around the cabin. So far I've stacked my wife and I have stacked about 20 face cords. We've prepared and stacked 20 face cords of hardwood, and now I'm going to get to some of the softwood, especially these slabs that came off the mill. It's mostly pine and spruce and some fur. So it's not good for burning like for heat, but it's good for getting fire started and for quick cooking fires. I see the chimneys getting pretty creosotered up there. I'm going to have to clean that, I think, before winter really gets going. Anyway, in pretty good shape for firewood, but I have it. It's kind of scattered so I'd like to get more of it under cover before winter. But 20 face cords is enough for probably a year and a half, so I'm not out of wood.

Speaker 1: 1:13

I'm not worried about having enough wood for this year, but some of that is green, so I'm going to continue to find all the dead standing trees around the workshop. That's where most of the stuff is stacked right now, most of the hardwood, because that's where most of the hardwood stand is. So I've got beech, hard maple, oak, some soft maple, red maple, yellow birch and a little bit of paper birch. So that area there I've got some pretty good sized dead standing beech trees especially, and a few maples, quite a few maples, maybe the odd oak. So that's great firewood to burn for this year. So I'll get that cut, separate it, burn it for this year and then keep the unseasoned and the wet stuff for the following years.

Speaker 1: 1:59

Now a lot of that wood probably what five, six face cords I would say of that hardwood is stuff that I had cut down to clear the area for the gardens. I had left the logs on the ground. So I'm just cutting them up now that's what three years later and splitting them up. So some of it's bad, like it's too rotten to use, and then some of it the core is good but the outside soft and punky and holding moisture. So I have to let that dry out a little bit. But mainly what I'm doing this year is just mixing some green-seasoned wood, green wood, unseasoned wet wood that's punky and good, hard, dry stuff. So good combination. So I've got to really pay attention on every fire how I'm mixing, matching that wood.

Speaker 1: 2:48

Well, for example, out here a couple birch trees you can see. The problem with birch trees is that when they die the birch bark actually holds in the moisture. So they tend to rot, even when they're standing, until the point where they just fall over, and when that happens they're already too far gone to use as effect of firewood. It's just too saturated with moisture so it's not as good. But there's one that I cut down that's hanging right there in the other one, cut that early summer so it's been standing up kind of wedged in that tree so it wouldn't be too far gone to use for this year.

Speaker 1: 3:26

But yeah, firewood, when you're burning wood for heat and for cooking there's a lot of variables, size of the stove, size of the firebox being one of them, and how well you can control the air flow. So the air that's going up the chimney you can see on the stove here when I'm cooking I'll close the damper on the chimney pipe itself so that's basically stopping the air and the hot air from rushing up the chimney. So by closing that over it kind of comes up the heat and then kind of curls back down inside the stove. When I open that up, the heat goes up faster. If I close the dampers down low and keep that damper on the chimney pipe open, it'll smoke more because it's not getting enough oxygen or less oxygen down at the fire level, but that's still the heat and smoke still going up the chimney. But if I open up the lower dampers that are allowing air into the stove as well as that chimney one, the fire just races through, which is good for just getting really like a hot fire going, which helps burn out the creosote in the chimney and in the firebox itself and the glass especially, and then you can damper that down and once there's some coals in there and then put wood in and then you can control the fire exactly for what I need it to do, depending on what I'm using it for, whether it's heat or cooking or whether it's for overnight.

Speaker 1: 4:58

So for cooking what I'm doing is using soft wood, so all these slabs would be good for that. So let's say the fire has died right down and just a little bed of coals in there from the night before or something. So in the morning, let's say I'm going to make coffee, so I'll throw some of the softwood in which burns really fast and really hot but doesn't leave a coal and it doesn't create a sustained fire, but it heats up the firebox and the chimney and the stove top very quickly. And then the next best thing on that would be small splits of oak or something hardwood but dry. That'll put a lot of heat out, more heat than the softwoods and a more sustained heat. So that's going to create a lot of quick heat. That'll fire up and heat up that stove and allow me to cook faster or boil water quicker. And then what I'll do is I'll find my dry wood. So, let's say, because of this mixture of seasoned and unseasoned wood, what I'll do is I'll take some, a good chunk or two, of hardwood dry.

Speaker 1: 6:05

Ideally I get really hard wood that has a lot of BTU, a lot of stored energy in it. So that would be for me it would be oak. Ash and hard maple would be the best woods here. Ironwood I have a lot of that, but it tends to be smaller and I keep it in rounds, so not quite as good for getting a hot fire if I want a fairly quick fire. What else? Yellow birch is really good.

Speaker 1: 6:30

So what do I have? I have no hickory, no walnut, so what I have here is a lot of pine ear species in the pine forest here. So I have the pine spruce and birch or a fir so I'll call some fir which are the softwoods that are not good for burning other than those quick hot fires. And the other problem with that wood, by the way, is that it sparks a lot. So if the door of the stove is open a bit, sparks will come flying out. Sparks will go up to chimney, which creates a risk of chimney fire, and for an outdoor fire it creates a lot of sparks that are jumping into your face but also can go up into these pine trees. So you got to it's really good campfire wood because it sounds nice and it burns hot and high and fast, but it is sparky so it's not great for inside.

Speaker 1: 7:16

Anyway, the pine ear species that are growing in this pine forest are the trees that got started about 80, 85 years ago. Whenever that fire went through here, they germinated first. So I have these old birch trees and then some younger birch that have been propagated by those older birch. So the birch tree is kind of a medium level energy output, firewood, red maple and other pine ear species, as we call it soft maple, so it's not as dense as the hard sugar maple, which I have less of here. Cherry, which again are mostly small here because they're growing. They got kind of overtaken by these pine and spruce trees so they got shaded out. So they're all small and kind of twisted, but they're good.

Speaker 1: 8:01

Firewood, the aspen they got lots of aspen, but it's not great. That'll be quaking aspen here, poplar species, and they're not great for firewood. It's just not good for firewood. It's too soft and it's kind of punky. It doesn't even burn really that great, kind of just smolders a little bit. But you know, pinch it's fine, what matches are often made of, actually. So it'll burn good if you split it up like that, but then it burns really fast.

Speaker 1: 8:32

Okay, so the really hard woods I could mention are for me you got sugar maple very little ash left. It's all died off because of the emerald ash borer. So I think I might have seen my last. No, there might be a few ash trees in the low spot back here, which that's where the black ash does grow in these low areas. So I might have a few left. But I cut one of the last ones that I'm aware of down the other day and it was dead, just died this year finally. But anyway that's really good firewood. So oak, red oak I don't have any white oak, so just red oak, ash, black ash, yellow birch, which is a really good hardwood, much different than white birch. The sugar maple in patches have a lot of it and that is really good firewood. Really hard, really dense, holds a good coal. It makes a good firewood cool.

Speaker 1: 9:29

So I'm getting this firewood shed stacked here which would be used for wood for burning inside but also for the outdoor kitchen. Got a bunch of wood here. They're going to split up a lot of that soft wood which would be good for the outdoor kitchen. I don't mind hot, quick, sparky fires in there that boil some water quickly with. And then all the hardwood in the pile are stacked by the workshop. That's the majority of it and that's oh, it's a lot of beech. So beech has been dying around the workshop. So I got all this big, all these huge beech that I'm cutting up. But some of those I've had on the ground cut them down early so that they wouldn't fall over and I need to cut those off. Some of them are punky and some of them are not even usable anymore, but some of the big ones or the cores, are still really good and hard. So that's it for here.

Speaker 1: 10:22

I know it's different all over the country, all over the countries and all over the world. People have access to different types of firewood out west. A lot of times it's all soft woods, but some of those soft woods are harder than our soft woods here because of the way they grow in the species. So it's different everywhere. But I'm fortunate that I live in an area that I've got access to lots of these softwood trees for building materials, all the spruce and pine that I used to build the cabin, for example, and then I have all the nice hard woods for tapping, for maple syrup and maple sugar and for firewood. So I've got the best of both worlds here. Anyway, in your area I'm just curious what you guys use and what you find, if you maybe share in the comments below what's good in your region so anybody that's starting up or new to homesteading or new to heating or cooking with wood in your area will know what the best woods are. Anyway, that's it. I'm going to sign out here and get back to work. See sun's starting to come out, so we'll see if I can make some good progress here and get lots of wood put away now.

Speaker 1: 11:36

The other thing about firewood is that you're looking for not as dry wood as you can get, but pretty dry firewood in order to work efficiently. What will happen if you have wood that's unseasoned, so it's green like where it's recently alive, or if it's just saturated, it's really wet? Is that the fire? Let's say you had an existing fire and it's or coals in the fire box and you put on a piece of wood that's unseasoned so it's got a high moisture content. You'll actually hear the water boiling in that wood and coming out the ends, coming out the end grain is the grains running mostly this way. So the water is bubbling out the ends here and it's taking a lot of energy to boil that water first just to dry the wood out. So you can literally you know, have a really hot bed of coals or even some firewood on fire inside. So flame inside the fire box you put on some wet wood and it kind of just sucks the heat out of, out of the fire because the fire is now well, it's like putting water basically on the fire. So you end up with a much cooler firebox so it cools everything down and that's when you get creosote issues. That's when the smoke starts to accumulate on the glass of the fire of your fireplace or the sidewalls or especially in the chimney, because as the heat and smoke is going up the chimney, the further the chimney is away from the fire, the hot fire the cooler it gets. So on a cold day, by the time it gets out the top of the chimney it might be quite cool and that's where it just solidifies the, the creosote solidifies and you get a thick layer of that creosote on there and that's what catches fire. That's why you need to clean out your chimney a couple times a year, or should.

Speaker 1: 13:29

So moisture contents key. I do have a moisture meter. I can tell just by feeling it, though, like you can, you can feel the texture kind of feels greasy. Yeah, that that has a slight greasy feel to it, which is just moisture in the wood. If that sits out here, because this has been cut for well, probably came off the mill a year ago in that pile. So let's say this has been sitting there normally would have seasoned, would have dried, but all that wood on top of it because it was in a pile stopped it from fully drying. So it's seasoned but not dry. So once that does get exposed now to the sun, and because I've split it into a two by two piece of wood here, it has more surface area so that more moisture can escape. So with the sun on it and some wind, that's going to dry out pretty quickly now but basically takes about a year per inch to dry out a piece of wood fully to season it. That's a good rule of thumb when you're drying out, say, boards.

Speaker 1: 14:33

So when I cut on the mill, let's say a two inch thick board, that would take two years to get down to 12 to 15 percent moisture, depending on your heat source inside the in your house, your cabin, it could vary. So with dry heat in the summer or in the winter, with the fire going all the time, the moisture level gets quite low in the cabin. But then in the winter or in the summer sorry, no fire going and also humidity, we start to get how the wood starts picking up moisture out of the air and expanding. So that's why in the winter, let's say a hardwood floor, you'll see let's say a four inch wide plank hardwood floor, you'll see gaps between the boards in the. In the winter, when you have that dry heat and that air itself is drier because it's the warm, air can hold more moisture, so you'll get the wood shrinking and you'll get gaps between the boards. And then, come, come summertime, the more the hotter it is, the more the air can hold the moisture, so the more humidity you have and that wood starts expanding and then it closes up those gaps. So with firewood, like I said, you're trying to get that moisture content down.

Speaker 1: 15:49

Now this hardwood that I cut just this year, that's like 25 to 30 percent moisture. So if that stuff, you put it in the fire and you can literally just hear it boiling and you can see the water coming out of the end green. So it took, takes like 15, 20 minutes just to dry the wood out with an existing fire before it really catches and starts putting out heat itself. So you end up with almost a net, no net gain and heat. So it's a horrible way to try to heat your place or cook.

Speaker 1: 16:23

It's almost impossible to cook on that stove, especially like what I'm making maple syrup. You'll see me trying to use all this kind of garbage wood. That's not good for indoor heating and a lot of it's wet or you know it's hardwood or birch or something that's been sitting around and it doesn't generate enough, doesn't heat up that top of that wood stove enough to boil the sap, or it takes forever to boil the sap. That way, if I expose that bottom of that pan to direct flame which I did last year, so the syrup pan sitting on concrete blocks with fire directly underneath so the fire can hit the bottom of it, it boils quickly. So in a wood stove like this one that doesn't it's not a proper, real cook stove, so the top is solid steel so I have to heat up that entire steel surface in order to cook and especially to boil.

Speaker 1: 17:19

Things like boil water takes a lot of heat to generate. You have to generate a lot of heat to get that steel heated up enough to boil this green wood. It might sometimes doesn't even get up to that point where it'll boil the water. So I have to find the driest stuff or the pine and stuff like this that has a high flame, that a lot of flame is hitting that steel top of the wood stove. So it's a lot to learn, it's a lot of trial and error and, like I said, it depends on what wood you have in your area. You'll get to know the dryer, more dense wood. You'll get to know to feel for moisture or to buy a moisture meter and know what moisture content you should be aiming for before for certain applications. Like I said, if you're heating, cooking or just having a pleasure fire, then you don't really care about the heat as much. But again, keep an eye on your wood stove or near your fireplace and your chimney to make sure the crease so it's not building up.

Speaker 1: 19:26

This will have very little heat value. It's so punky, basically rotten, but it is dry, fairly dry. It'll dry out more. So it might be something I use for running out here cooking fire or campfires on there. So I'll put it in there just to keep it dry. I'm going to keep it in that rubber. That's a good maple there, nice and dry. That's why it's split so nicely. It's not cold enough to be frozen, so that's good. See, it's rotten in the middle though right, so that steals some of the heat energy. But otherwise, that hard piece that's not punky, that's good like an overnight firewood, just kind of putting it off to one side. The better hardwood is off to one side. Softwood and kindling type pieces are on this side.

Speaker 1: 20:44

I've had a few people comment or ask me why I'm putting firewood or stacking the firewood bark up like that. But I only do that when I'm stacking it outside. So when it's outside in a pile, I want the water to hit that and run off, and if all the pieces are like this, as the water's going down, it keeps running off the bark on all of them all the way to the ground. If I'm putting it under cover like this, I'm doing it bark down and I'm trying as often as possible to get the bark to fall off as I'm splitting. This is on there pretty good though, so that's not going to come off. So if I put it in this pile under cover, where rain's not going to hit it, the moisture can escape from this a lot easier than it can. It's easier to drive some moisture up than it is to drive it down and out. So, like I said, all these are getting stacked under cover like this, and some of them like that to some of the times. I'm splitting it, because it, when you split it, a lot of times that bark will loosen itself, and it's not in this case. So I'm just going to leave it like that. Store it smaller pieces down here, bigger pieces up there, bark down.

Speaker 1: 22:14

Bark doesn't burn great, contrary to what you might think, because it looks like little pieces of wood so you think that's something that could be burned, kind of like a kindling, but bark.

Speaker 1: 22:25

One of the purposes of an outer bark on a tree is to protect the tree from the elements, including fire, so it's a hard surface. In fact you could have a fire go through here and a lot of these trees. If the barks up high enough or the branches are up high enough, they're not catching up fire. You can have like a completely healthy tree, a fine tree. It doesn't get damaged by the fire. The fire doesn't catch the bark, in other words. So trying to burn bark is not ideal, but the worst thing about it, it holds moisture in and also bugs, like I'm finding especially because this wood was piled on the ground over there finding lots of wood with larvae beetle larvae underneath the bark on the wood. Of course I don't have an example right here. I am finding lots of actual beetles but also lots of a white larvae. That's an all night wood, nice hard maple and good size. That firebox is big, so it can actually take like 20 inch plus wood.