Question About Burning Wood

OK wood burners. I have a lot of construction wood. I am talking 2x4's, 2x8's, even some 2x10's. Oh forgot the 1x2's. All pine. Can I burn it in the wood stove? This is all new wood from constuction site. No nails, or staples. I know not to burn the plywood because of the glue. So, can I burn this stuff or toss it into the dumpster?

You can burn it, but it's going to burn really hot. I would mix it in with some good hardwood, if you have any. Fool around with it and see what works best and be careful not to overfire your stove.

Hrm, I could swear I already posted a response to this.

Anyway, like Eric said, lumber is dry and pine, so it will burn fast and hot. You probably won't want to use it for overnight fuel, but you can get away with throwing a few sticks in along with the hardwood during the day I imagine. Personally, any construction scraps get made into kindling in my house. But I suppose some might not have a use for that much kindling.

Yup, exactly what Eric said. For what it's worth, burning that stuff caused such a hot fire in a fire place that it blew the glass doors. Of course wood stove "glass" is much tougher than fireplace glass, but do be careful.

On a side note: I tried burning a peice of Sumac the other day...WOW, talk about going up quick. That stuff is like putting on kiln dried lumber or worse. Really hot and lasted like 15 minutes. It would make great kindling.

True. My only concern then would be that it is still kiln dried (all lumber is, i think?) and so it would still burn pretty fast.

I used to know a guy who heated his house completely with construction scraps. got them for nothing by the truck load. Be careful. Experiment. figure out what you are doing and you should be ok. I'd probly not use it for overnight (unattended) fires but if you are there to look over it I would think that it would do find. I've burned 2x4 scraps in my stove in small amounts to get a bed of coals established and I wasn't that impressed......that said I can easily see the potential for it getting away from you.

Thank you everybody for your help. We are renting a home and are newbies to burning wood. We do not like it. But it is better than turning up the propane or using the electric baseboards. It took us a while to find out how to use the stove properly. The landlords were of no help. My wife downloaded the manual for the stove off the intenet. The new house will have a pellet stove. Now if we can only figure out which plumber to use.