Wood Stacking Question

fossil said:

Well, it does...just very very slowly. But after it's split, it dries much more effectively from the freshly exposed (and vastly larger) side surfaces. Leaving wood in rounds simply delays any meaningful seasoning of the wood until it's split. Rick

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Splits sure do dry faster than rounds, even the small rounds. What always gets me is that I only ever see water cooking out of the ends of a damp split. I KNOW it has to be drying over the entire surface area, but I'm only sure that I'm cooking it out of the ends. It's bizarre, indeed. The moisture must prefer to use the same mechanisms for travel that it did when the tree was alive.

Most of the time I "split the difference" and crack the smaller rounds witht he splitter just enough for air to get in the middle. I admit I don't have any data on the outcome but I assume it helps air get in while keeping them mostly together.

So long as the wood remains in rounds, internal moisture hasn't much choice but to travel axially along the grain (within the phloem and xylem), just as it did while the tree was living. water will evaporate off the cut ends, and they will weather and crack and give the impression that the wood is dry. But this internal movement is generally very very slow, so that a round that appears all dry and cracked on the cut ends may well be retaining significant moisture deeper inside. One of the functions of the bark of tree is prevent the loss of moisture from within the tree, so as long as the bulk of the surface area of the wood remains covered with bark, drying is going to be quite slow.

Splitting the wood exposes lots of barkless surface area and seriously rips into the vascular structures that contain lots of water. Splitting releases the water from inside the wood. Splitting is the fundamental key to seasoning (drying) firewood.

And the smaller you split the faster it dries.....

An old farmer once said to "stack your splits just close enough for a mouse to get through."

Once it's split, I seriously doubt that you could stack it tightly enough to keep air from circulating through the stack. Don't over-think this thing, just get to work.

Parallax said:

What about splitting and then storing it with the pieces facing each other so it looks like an unsplit round? How much will this slow the drying process?

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It would take forever to stack 10 cords if you plan out the positioning of each piece. One nice thing about splitting and stacking wood is that it's a fairly mindless task. Split it, then stack it. It's that simple.