Pine experiment for next season.

i have split and stacked a heap of pine that i am really keen to use next winter for a bit of an experiment too.....will be the first time i have burnt inside....deliberately split large hoping i can get more burn time out of them........

Although Ive only burned pine (didn't know it at the time - was a greenhorn) I'm def going to get a load for next year, I'm also going to take it a step further and saw up a rack of dead standing cedar, I have tones of it (dead, 5-10" diameter) I figured it would be good for the stove and passed it up, but now I know if its dry it will burn fine.

Best thing about my local spruces is they will consistently season in one summer. I split down to about 4" max, with a few at 6" max single dimension. I dunno how fast larger splits will season. A lot of mine seem to come off the splitter with cross sections like 2x8s or 2x10s, those I just season without splitting again.

Another nice thing about having some spruce in the woodpile is I don't need to keep other kindling around. If I need kindling in the shoulder seasons I just grab a piece of spruce with pretty straight grain and get busy with a hatchet. I have had two inches of coals in the bottom of my stove since whenever I cleaned the flue last, maybe a month ago or so.

I love burning the stuff. They do burn hot, but they do burn fast.

I took a gnarly looking spruce split into my local Blaze King dealer a few weeks ago. If I had gotten busy with a tool I probably could have scraped enough sap off the bark to make a baseball sized lump. I asked if it would be OK to burn in my new catalyst equipped stove. All the eyes behind the counter lit up and one guy offered me five bucks for it.

The word from them was to get the stove and the catalyst up to temp, but leave some room in the firebox. Once everything is good and hot in bypass, open the door, toss that sappy split on top, close the door and engage the cat. I tried it once, woo-wee that thing burnt real nice. I ran out a couple times to check my stack plume, the cat was handling it just fine. I have eight or ten of them left, just waiting for it to cool off some more before I play that card again. Maybe after I let the stove burn out to clean the flue again I'll use a couple of those in a re-heated stove to take the chill off the house in a big hurry.

I agree with the previously stated sentiment that burning softwoods like pine and spruce is one of the best kept secrets in woodburning.

NewStoveGuy said:

Doh! Why is that?

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You can open the door with a hot cat....most stoves have a bypass so you open the bypass and wait 20 or 30 seconds, and then open the door to load. You never open the door with the bypass engaged because flame can flow out the door very quickly and burn you. I dont believe the "thermal shock" rumor....it's never happened to my stove. If your cat didn't handle it, it was ceramic and on it's way out to begin with....in my opinion anyway.