March 16, 2013 - Give her some wood!

[SPUCK]

Wet firewood can cause heavy creosote build-up in chimneys that can eventually ignite with disastrous results. To get the moisture out of firewood people typically just stack firewood up in rectangular stacks.

But some people - add some extra class.

[Clodfobble]

So how come the wood doesn't stay wet, being stored outside in the snow? Even if it's on a covered porch or in a shed or whatever, it seems like the air is still pretty damp.

[orthodoc]

As long as air can get around all of it, it'll dry. You also orient the pieces on the top with the bark side up, to shed water.

Those are amazing! Okay, I may be ortho the easily amazed but those woodpiles are art. It wouldn't even have occurred to me to create images like that. It would make me sad to take them apart to use the wood ...

[Griff]

Cold air holds less moisture. So what you want is airflow through your wood pile, any organized stack that minimizes constant exposure to water will do okay. I have a slat sided woodshed with a roof to maximize air flow and minimize the precipitation exposure. Everybody has a preferred method. This guy has a good one, but I've done this done on pallets with a perforated pipe up the middle to increase air flow.

[footfootfoot]

Without getting into an extensively technical treatise on wood and moisture content (remember the cucumbers? It's more complicated than that) Freshly cut wood has a lot of water, some of it is bound up int the cells and some is "free" i.e. between the cells.

The Moisture content of the wood is significantly greater than that of the air and the moisture of the wood eventually reaches equilibrium with the air (or very close)

Once the bound water leaves the cell, it doesn't really enter the cell again, it mostly will saturate the wood fibers between the cells. It doesn't take a whole lot of air circulation to dry out wood. Wood loses most if its moisture through the end grain, not through the side grain. Stacking the wood on its side with the ends exposed to air will bring the wood to equilibrium MC pretty quickly. Especially in winter.

[Gravdigr]

I give Baby wood.

But she gives it to me first.

[ZenGum]

I would feel ashamed to pull those wood stacks apart.

Also, those first ones look kind of dangerous, as in wood-slipping-off-the-top and whacking-you-on-the-head dangerous.

[Aliantha]

It's been a long time since I've seen that much wood in one place.

[footfootfoot]

You Australians have been profligate with your forests lately, haven't you? Or is that conflagrate?

[Aliantha]

Well, there really wasn't that much wood here when us white fellas arrived in the first place, but we've done our best to get rid of what we found.

Luckily for our gum trees, they're not much good for anything except feeding koalas and providing shade and keeping soil together, so they get left in peace mostly. The wood is not even that great to burn because of the eucalyptus causing it to explode more than other wood.

[ZenGum]

I disagree on both counts.

We've cleared something like 85% of the native forests/vegetation since settlement. That includes things like mulga and mallee scrub which are tree-ish but rarely more than 4 to 6 metres high.

Also, well dried eucalyptus is my firewood of choice when I go camping, especially redgum. Dense wood, long burn time. Maybe it's different for fireplaces in houses though.

[Aliantha]

We've been a pretty treeless place in comparison to most other continents for a very long time Zen. That's what I was referring to. By very long, I mean tens of thousands of years. And I did say that we've done our best to get rid of most of what we found, and yes, I was referring to indoor fireplaces. I don't know anyone who would choose to burn gum tree timber indoors.

eta: Reasons people choose not to burn gum indoors is partly due to the potential for explosion, and largely because gum is notoriously difficult to mill, and tends to wreck blades, so can't be cut to size very easily.

This was a large part of the reason for the settlement on Norfolk Is when Australia was first settled by the Brits. They thought there was plenty of timber for dwellings but when they tried to cut the mostly gum tree forests, all they did was destroy their blades. Norfolk Pines were found to be much more suitable so they decided to go chop all of them down instead.

[JuancoRocks]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

I disagree on both counts.

Also, well dried eucalyptus is my firewood of choice when I go camping, especially redgum. Dense wood, long burn time. Maybe it's different for fireplaces in houses though.

I agree.......We have a lot of Eucalyptus here in Arizona (I have 10 that are about 85 feet) and I find that it burns clean and hot. I take it camping and use it to bring mesquite and oak to proper coals for cooking.

Although some think of the widowmaker reputation of Eucalyptus (dropping branches) I prefer to think of it as free firewood.

JR

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

I disagree on both counts.

We've cleared something like 85% of the native forests/vegetation since settlement. That includes things like mulga and mallee scrub which are tree-ish but rarely more than 4 to 6 metres high.

Also, well dried eucalyptus is my firewood of choice when I go camping, especially redgum. Dense wood, long burn time. Maybe it's different for fireplaces in houses though.

So you admit to being responsible for the clearing Tasmania of its off the maps?

[ZenGum]

The clear felling of the Map of Tasmania is a different issue altogether, and one in which I have had no hand.