What kind of free wood did I get?

Good morning all,

First time poster, first winter with wood heat! Looking forward to learning as much as possible. I've already picked up a ton of tips on this site.

My roommates and I came across a ton of free wood as a result of Hurricane Irene. We just moved in to the house in August so I doubt any of this stuff is going to be ready to burn this year.

I was hoping some of you could chime in as to what kind of wood you think this is. Reason I ask is because it is HELL to split. Yes, it's still green, but I've split some other wood in the picture below by hand just fine. It seemed to be some type of ash or birk.

Any thoughts? I'm particularly asking about the large logs to the right with the coarse textured bark.



There are some very large rounds that were left at the house which I believe to be the same species.



The only thing we've been told is that 90% of the trees that came down during the hurricane were tulip poplars. Nothing specific about this wood though.

Thanks in advance for any help!

--Andy

Remmy122 said:

Tulip, got a truck load yesterday. Not great stuff but it burns.

Click to expand...

Thanks, that's what I thought. This stuff is a pain to split. Everything that is left in the pictures won't split by hand, so we're getting a splitter this weekend to take care of the rest of it. I hope some of it will be ready to burn, it would suck to do all this work and have to pay for wood.

But I guess we'll be ready for next year...

I think I have an addiction starting.

--Andy

So, we (the roommates and I) had a wood party this weekend to tear in to all of that.

First was to get the equipment:



Then we started splitting! I was extremely disappointed in most of the tulip poplar. It was almost stalling the 30 ton splitter and was extremely stringy, wet, and nasty when split. We stacked what we could identify in the woods to dry out another year before splitting:



However the rest of the wood was BEAUTIFUL. The large rounds of poplar (bottom picture a few posts up) had been sitting for almost a year and split to nice fat wedges nicely. The other woods (red on the inside) split really nicely. But I wasn't keeping an eye on my room mates when they were stacking. I failed to mention the concept of airflow, and this is what resulted:



So it's not a pretty stack. Oh well. It was basically free. The other side of the deck:



I picked up a cheap-o Harbor Freight moisture meter. Most of the smaller wood I split by hand three weeks ago is under 25%. The "evil" poplar pegged the meter - it was foaming and spitting water while it was splitting. The big poplar rounds were the best at between 15-20%.

Not bad for our first year. We will end up burning some of this stuff starting in about a month or two, we have no choice. But we'll have a good jump on next year's wood so it balances out.

Last, but not least, the stove:



House was built in 1997 but this is a non-EPA stove. I think it was added afterwards.

Thanks for looking!

--Andy