Call me crazy but!!!

[Chrism]

I did a burn in my stove last nigh with chunks of wood 6"x9" instead of burning from the wood pile with 18" pieces. Omg it burned a lot longer, burned cleaner and I was able to fit so much more wood in the stove it wasn't even funny. Has anyone else tried this

 

[Wade A.]

You talking about loading N/S instead of E/W? Lots of advocates for that method here. It might be the difference in performance you noted, or it might just be that the chunks you had were drier than what you've been burning. Any ideas on that?

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Okay, your official name is now Crazy Butt.


What you did sounds like what many of us do and that is burning uglies or cut-offs. Yes, it works great in any stove.

 

[Battenkiller]

Okay, your official name is now Crazy Butt.

:lol:

Dennis, you beat me to the punch once again. ;-)

6x9" chunks are compact pieces of fuel. They will naturally burn much slower because they have a much lower surface area:volume ratio than long, skinny splits have. If you can pack them tightly in there they will burn even slower for the same reason.

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Sorry about that BK.

 

[Wade A.]

....and, we should note, "slow burning" doesn't necessarily equate to more total btu's, only a longer burning time, and it is usually a dirtier burn to boot. (You said it was a cleaner burn, so I'm not doubting that you know.) If the object is to make a fire that will burn for hours on end, you can do that fairly easily, but the consequence is usually that it never puts out any appreciable warmth. A recent thread here addressed that, umm, "technique" of just throwing on a huge round once a day, and I think the consensus was that the typical problem is that large chunks are not usually dried through-and-through. You may have found a few in your pile, and it sounds like you did. How realistic is it to think you will be able to do that consistently? For me, that is not very likely. Too, if I do find a round or a chunky-ugly that will fit, I'm burning it "blind", without really being able to predict its moisture content, even if it is of the same vintage as some of my smaller splits, or even if it is from the same tree. If it lays in there and smolders for a day, I've got a real problem.

 

[bogydave]

CB:
Thicker pieces of wood burn longer. Place them in there stacked tight as possible & you get longer burn times.
You are learning some of the "self taught" tricks.
Same for the normal wood, bigger & stacked in the as tight & close as you can, you get more in there & longer burns
A tip/trick to remember

 

[Dune]

Another thing to remember is that short pieces season faster/give off more heat/burn longer.

 

[Chrism]

Ploughboy with my primary air 3/4 closed I was maintaining 400 to 450 degrees and no smoke was coming out of my chimney! That even as a newbie know that's kick a** !!

 

[Stephen in SoKY]

We have several cross tie mills in the area that will fill a 16' trailer with oak cut offs that are virtually the same size for $10 a load. Sounds like cheap fuel, but there's no good way to stack them for air circulation so drying takes forever. One neighbor piles them and stirs throughout the year with a backhoe and seems to get them in pretty good shape, but even with a FEL I realy don't think I could stir enough to expose the bottom ones for drying. They sure do pack in a stove nicely though.

 

[Dune]

We have several cross tie mills in the area that will fill a 16' trailer with oak cut offs that are virtually the same size for $10 a load. Sounds like cheap fuel, but there's no good way to stack them for air circulation so drying takes forever. One neighbor piles them and stirs throughout the year with a backhoe and seems to get them in pretty good shape, but even with a FEL I realy don't think I could stir enough to expose the bottom ones for drying. They sure do pack in a stove nicely though.

Use stickers.

http://ohioline.osu.edu/for-fact/0008.html

Any extra labor is more than offset by cost.

 

[snowleopard]

Okay, your official name is now Crazy Butt.

:lol:

Dennis, you beat me to the punch once again. ;-)

Why I like this site: I saw that thread title and thought, "I can do that!" and then I thought, "everyone here will roll their eyes and think, `How juvenile is that?'," and then I thought, "No one will have a clue as to what I'm talking about", and then I decided to do it anyway, and not one, but two of you got there first.

I have gone from wood-worried a month ago to a chortling, half-mad woodmidas gloating over my c/s/s stores as of this weekend, half a step ahead of the ice storm. When I step out my downstairs door and under a sheltering deck above, I walk through a 10' corridor of wood six feet high, and two rows deep on one side, two and a half on the other, and stacked between them is pile of rounds that average about 6" long. (I ordered birch 18" long and got a load that ranged from 12" to 25"--these are the trim ends from the half-cord of too-long wood.) I'll be interested to see how they burn--sure not planning on splitting them!

 

[Backwoods Savage]

snowleopard, I wouldn't worry too much as they should burn just fine. However, I would burn them only during the daytime and not try of overnight burns with them unless you can pack them tight. Oh, and sorry to have beaten you to the punch! lol