What do you do when the wood is less than seasoned?

You need to split the wood then take a reading. Moisture on the surface evaporates quickly so you won't
get an accurate measurement without splitting first.

I don't have a big area to store wood. Plus its shaded so some of my wood doesn't get seasoned enough. Last year I put the wood around
the stove to help dry it out. That worked ok but made a mess. This year I bought a metal wood rack at Lowes. I put the rack behind the stove
I load it the dry stuff on the right side the wet stuff on the left side. By the time the dry stuff is gone the wet wood I put on the rack is dry enough
to burn. Seems to work pretty good. Don't know if that would help you out having an insert though.

I guess you could load it in a semi trailer send it to fossil he lives in the desert. Have him season it for you. Then have him send you some nice dry wood back to burn while yours is seasoning.

Yeah I have been drying out wood inside my house for years. Works like a charm to speed up the process. Even 1 week inside makes a difference if your wood is not quite seasoned.

If you are gonna buy 3 cords at once see if you can get the multi cord discount.

Berone said:

What do you do when the wood is less than seasoned?

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I leave it in the woodshed

Do you have next year's wood in now so you won't have to figure this out again next year?

Bigg_Redd said:

Berone said:

What do you do when the wood is less than seasoned?

Click to expand...

I leave it in the woodshed

Do you have next year's wood in now so you won't have to figure this out again next year?

Click to expand...

Good point. If the answer is no, leaving the wood in the shed solves both problems.

Well, my method worked quite well for me this year.

I cut and split about a cord and a half of spruce beach driftwood this past late summer. Most of the splits were in the 20-28% moisture content range. As I split the rounds, I tossed and let pile up a large amount of splits (I would guess 3/4 cord) on the flat bed of my double-wide snowmobile trailer. The resulting load resembled a solid T-pee, approximately 9' in diameter at the base, 5' high at the top.

I work in the local diesel-engine run power plant for the electric utility here. We have two large garage bays in the engine rooms. In the summer/early fall, the room temperatures in there easily are in the 90-100 degree range. I took my Polaris 6x6 ATV, hooked up the full trailer load of split wood, and drove it out to my work place, which is 2 miles from my house. (I live in a small town: ATV's are permitted on the road. I ride my ATV to work most every day). I backed the wood into the garage bay and parked the trailer in there for two weeks. I took a large (20") high speed/high volume exhaust fan (used for evacuating smoke from buildings by firemen), placed it on top of a 55-gallon drum about 10 feet from the center of my trailer load of splits, turned it on, and let it run for two weeks. With such a multitude of split surfaces available to the fan, pushing air through and around it all was going well. I moved the fan to the opposite end after a week.

I did this with both loads of wood, and ended up with my partial winter-use supply being down below 10% of moisture. I simply drove the loads home, backed it up to my storage area, and stacked away.

I'm burning the wood as we speak.

I'm going to do it all again next summer, but begin earlier and plan to put up three times what I did this year.

That is pretty cool. You basically built your own version of a kiln, lol.

Frostbit said:

Well, my method worked quite well for me this year.

I cut and split about a cord and a half of spruce beach driftwood this past late summer. Most of the splits were in the 20-28% moisture content range. As I split the rounds, I tossed and let pile up a large amount of splits (I would guess 3/4 cord) on the flat bed of my double-wide snowmobile trailer. The resulting load resembled a solid T-pee, approximately 9' in diameter at the base, 5' high at the top.

I work in the local diesel-engine run power plant for the electric utility here. We have two large garage bays in the engine rooms. In the summer/early fall, the room temperatures in there easily are in the 90-100 degree range. I took my Polaris 6x6 ATV, hooked up the full trailer load of split wood, and drove it out to my work place, which is 2 miles from my house. (I live in a small town: ATV's are permitted on the road. I ride my ATV to work most every day). I backed the wood into the garage bay and parked the trailer in there for two weeks. I took a large (20") high speed/high volume exhaust fan (used for evacuating smoke from buildings by firemen), placed it on top of a 55-gallon drum about 10 feet from the center of my trailer load of splits, turned it on, and let it run for two weeks. With such a multitude of split surfaces available to the fan, pushing air through and around it all was going well. I moved the fan to the opposite end after a week.

I did this with both loads of wood, and ended up with my partial winter-use supply being down below 10% of moisture. I simply drove the loads home, backed it up to my storage area, and stacked away.

I'm burning the wood as we speak.

I'm going to do it all again next summer, but begin earlier and plan to put up three times what I did this year.

Click to expand...

WTF?

Don't you know that wood dries better when it's frozen?

I had two cord of cherry delivered in mid-November. It was cut from a hedge row on a Thursday and delivered the next day. I brought about a face cord inside and put it in my open bin 36" from my stove. It goes from floor to ceiling in the basement, so I can't easily do a full rotation, but I've been working down at an angle toward the floor and then backfilling the pile every four or five days or so (best I can explain it) to get new wood inside. I've been mixing this in with some nice splits from the cord of white ash I had left over from last season, and I've been getting good, hot burns.

I did this again exactly four days ago, the difference being that the latest backfill had been exposed to two nights of sub 0ºF weather. You can see that the new wood that had been deep frozen is already much more deeply fissured in the ends than the older stock. You can see the angle where I place the new wood on top. It's even more cracked looking than the stuff at the center bottom, which is not only in a direct line to the radiant heat from the stove, but it has been sitting there since the beginning of the heating season.

In my stove room I have an old produce scale that I use to measure parts for the ultralight canoes I like to build. It sits about four feet from the stove. I tossed one of the new splits on at the time I refilled my rack and marked it with a red grease pencil: "7 3/4 12/28." It lost about half a pound overnight then the rate slowed down, but it's still dropping fast. I just went down to check it and it is already down to 6 lbs, 9 oz. That's a 1 lb 3 oz drop in just four days, or about a 15% water weight reduction. Freshly cut cherry has about 40% water by weight, so it has at most 25% moisture content left in it. Probably less because it was sitting outside for a month before I even brought it in. I'll bet it's down to below 20% in three more days.

The rest of the new wood is burning hot and fine with zero sizzle and almost instant ignition when it hits the coal bed - no need to mix in the seasoned ash (save that for those minus 20ºF days coming up in a couple weeks).

My take on this kinda unscientific experiment:

- Deep freeze/thaw cycles tear the hell out of cut wood, making moisture-trapping case hardening less likely to occur
- Firewood seasons outside, but does it faster inside by the stove and adds moisture to the parched inside air
- At least with cherry (the hickory I bought from the same guy isn't doing so well) you can get perfectly seasoned firewood in a few weeks time
- It's a hell of a lot easier to eliminate all the shuffling and buy/cut and stack it a year in advance

But...

If you are a first year wood burner and you want good clean heat producing burns, this may be your only option for inexpensive fuel. Anyone telling you his $150 cord was cut and stacked months before he reloaded it on his truck for delivery is either your mother or a liar.

Cherry is one of my favorite firewoods. It dries quickly, burns hot and fast, starts easily, splits like butter, smells good... and at least for me, provides a source of some of the prettiest wood on the planet for bowl turning, small boxes and canoe trim. No, it doesn't provide the total BTUs and long burns that oak, beech and hickory do per unit volume, but the total heat output per day for those willing to feed it into the stove faster may easily surpass those esteemed woods. And staying warm is the name of the game.

Plan ahead, when possible.

Otherwise put it in a dry shed with air circulation. Or,
stack it widely spaced in the sun with a tarp on the top
3 feet.

It is one of the few mistakes, that we will never repeat.

Cherry is a great burning wood - love the smell.

+1 on the indoor wood aging bins

Heck, it's New Year's Day and nothing to do but play with wood...

I just went down and fumbled through the bin and yanked out a piece that looked best as I could get to a perfect 1/4 round split off a 9" round. 14 3/4" long. Weight is 5 pounds even. Volume works out to be roughly 234 cu. in. (give or take)... that's .135 cu. ft. Density of water is 62.4 lbs/cu.ft. x .135 = 8.42 lbs. 5/8.42 = .59 as the SG of my test piece. SG of kiln dried cherry (12% MC) is about .56.

So... cherry cut late in the season when sap is low + one month outside in the cold + fours days in the stove side kiln = basically, not seasoned, but kiln-dried cherry. It will go even lower since the relative humidity in my shop right now is a skin-cracking 4% relative humidity measured with my sling psychrometer! (86ºF dry bulb, 65º wet bulb reading). Kids, don't try this at home unless you love nosebleeds. Time to mop a couple of buckets of water onto the bone-dry cement floor, maybe squeeze in another cord of green hickory. lol

Filled the stove half full of this cherry on top of a small coal bed and it fairly well blew up. Stove went from 350º to 750ºF within 10 minutes and flue to 600º before I shut the air down and let it level off at 550º in updraft mode to burn off the fuzz from those damp hickory logs I tossed on top before I went to bed last night.

I share this same problem. I resplit all my wood into 2-4" pieces and keep a chord inside to dry. It has worked quite well. Next year i will work hard to have my wood split stacked and ready in the spring so it will season properly. I suggest buying a chord and splitting it small this spring for next winter.

i brought white oak inside to dry
stacked it as open as possible & rotated a box fan on low around it, in the basement
for the last 3 days
it was in a neighbors tree above his house 3 months ago
i put whole 21" long 11+" diameter unsplit logs in on all the coals i can get, needs more raking
i had to shave the sides with tomahawk to 10" to get it in stove door
i thought it had to dry 2 years
i haven't seen any moisture come out of the ends
it burns 6-9 hours, gathered in november from my neighbor
i've run out of kiln & pine & am keeping it going with 4" logs from the same tree
it looks like i'll save $100 this month from trees in the neighborhood since i bought the stove this fall
i don't have a splitter or gas saw...yet
i've already swept my chimney once this year, just waiting on mother nature