A few years ago, I bought a couple loads of mixed wood from a charity organization. In their organization, they did fine work for The Lord, but anyone with a pair of helping hands could run the chainsaw and splitter. At the dump pile in my front yard, it became clear that lengths ran from 14” to 22.” I have a Summit, so I like 16.” Although Summits eat up 18 inchers, I don’t live in Bumchill, Alaska, and can usually afford to stack a few inches back from the glass.
The long ones could all be trimmed to 16” but I’m too cheap to trim an inch or two and toss those ends in the side bushes with the rest of the misc. scrap. For better or worse, anything between 18 and 20 inches got cut in half, over 20 inchers had the ugliest end cut to make a decent 15 incher. After stacking, I had about a face cord of uglies, ends really, but they looked ugly, and I happily forgot about them.
A few weeks ago, they reared their head when I went to load for first fire. The entire first stack in the bay and tops of the rest were short uglies. I decided that I will only burn ends until every one was gone.
What was learned? With care, you can stack a load of ends to make a tall skinny pile. The higher the pile, the better it burns. In fact, now I try to stack it right up against the top, where the hot air makes a fine secondary. The pile sags from the burn but secondaries keep going quite well. Maybe everyone knows this, or maybe there is a problem with the idea, but until otherwise, I’m stacking every new pile, ugly or not, with height in mind.
This might have taught me that even the uglies have some value in our world, but that was learned from personal experience some time ago.
The long ones could all be trimmed to 16” but I’m too cheap to trim an inch or two and toss those ends in the side bushes with the rest of the misc. scrap. For better or worse, anything between 18 and 20 inches got cut in half, over 20 inchers had the ugliest end cut to make a decent 15 incher. After stacking, I had about a face cord of uglies, ends really, but they looked ugly, and I happily forgot about them.
A few weeks ago, they reared their head when I went to load for first fire. The entire first stack in the bay and tops of the rest were short uglies. I decided that I will only burn ends until every one was gone.
What was learned? With care, you can stack a load of ends to make a tall skinny pile. The higher the pile, the better it burns. In fact, now I try to stack it right up against the top, where the hot air makes a fine secondary. The pile sags from the burn but secondaries keep going quite well. Maybe everyone knows this, or maybe there is a problem with the idea, but until otherwise, I’m stacking every new pile, ugly or not, with height in mind.
This might have taught me that even the uglies have some value in our world, but that was learned from personal experience some time ago.
Erred on the long side and so far, everything has fit in the stove, but about two dozen pieces had to be set to the side to be used at a special time when 'corner to corner" loading (a small load) would be ok. One of them happened to the wife, luckily she's observant enough that I didn't have a broken glass but did have a few questions to answer when I walked in the front door. 
