newbie question

I keep seeing referance to punky wood or wood getting punky. Could you please tell me what this means.Thanks for any info.

pretty much rotten

Yes rotten like xrayman says and prone to hold water and bugs. Sometimes parts of it will still be good but over all it's wood that just seems to smolder and requires more heat to burn than it puts out.

Thanks for the fast replies. Now I know

It will also be almost powdery.

Picture this: We say that wood is not a sponge so won't soak up all that rain when stacked in the summer. However, if you have punky wood, that definitely will soak up the rain. If we get any punky stuff, I simply haul it back to one of the brush piles. If it burns, it will burn there and not in my stove. You get mostly smoke from it and it simply is not worth putting in the stove.

Bet that will draw some comments! lol But those guys who burn it can have it all.

Even the punkiest wood dries out nice in my woodshed and gets burned in the stove. Before the shed, when I stored my wood outside, I laid down sacrifice Poplar on the ground to keep my good wood high and dry. I normally don't burn even good Poplar, let alone the punky stuff but after I built my shed I had so much of it and it was too wet and too much work to haul and burn on my brush pile, so I bucked it up and laid it up as the first outside course thinking it will take the horizontal rain instead of my goood stuff. Well... after a few years I saw how dry it was and decided I was just wasting space leaving it there so I burned it in the stove. It burned fast and hot.

I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to get punky wood but if I have it in hand and can dry it, I burn it.

I agree just not worth the effort, to the burn pile!

Now you know it is a wood burner's technical term. Try not to use it too much or too loudly.

A good question! Thanks.