Wet wood

[gyrfalcon]

Having just gotten a cheapo moisture meter from eBay, I went out to try it on my wood stacks. I knew they were pretty dry, but man, I was pleased to see the 12 - 18 percent readings on my older stacks. These are small splits, and I didn't take the time to split them any further or to wrestle with drilling holes to stick the moisture meter spikes in as far as they should go, so no doubt the actual moisture is a bit higher. But still...

And then it rained and rained and rained, more than 8 inches in 48 hours, and absolutey soaked all that nice dry wood, the added weight making all the stacks lean and a couple tumble over the end. When it stopped raining, I got readings around 35 to 40 percent on the wet wood. Just for the heck of it, I brought a couple of splits onto my south-facing screen porch to dry and see what the difference would be with the rest of the stuff I left outdoors.

That was about a week ago, and it's rained a number of times since and has been overcast and not very hot (even for Vermont) most of the time. When I checked the splits I had brought inside, they seemed a lot drier but still read around 30. The top splits on the stacks outside, though, are back down to high teens, low 20s, despite having been rained on some more over the last week.

Not a particularly rigorous experiment, but sure enough to convince me that moving air is the key to drying, not heat per se, and covering stacks is pointless unless you're in a really rainy climate . If two solid days of soaking rain only brings the moisture up to 35-40 and it loses that extra so quickly, a more normal rainfall pattern just isn't going to wet it enough to worry about. That's with dry wood to begin with, and my guess is that rainwater would penetrate even less into greener wood. I'm going to try something similar this winter after a couple of good snowfall/melt cycles and see how much difference the outside temperature makes. My sense from dealing with a lot of snowcrusted wood last winter is not much, but we'll see.

 

[Adios Pantalones]

Expecting rain for 6 out of the next 10 days, and it's been like that all summer except for a 3 week span a month and a half back. This has been a very wet summer for us. I normally don't cover, but I am starting to for times that I know it will rain. It may not help much, but maybe a little.

 

[N/A N/A]

If you would take the time to split the wood one more time and take a reading, I think you would be surprised of what different readings you get. The inside of the split is the "true" moisture reading. There is no need to split them all again, maybe just one or two different types of wood from different parts of the stack.

 

[gyrfalcon]

Expecting rain for 6 out of the next 10 days, and it's been like that all summer except for a 3 week span a month and a half back. This has been a very wet summer for us. I normally don't cover, but I am starting to for times that I know it will rain. It may not help much, but maybe a little.

I guess the question would be whether the water-wet slows down the seasoning process itself much or not. We're in a similar weather pattern here in central VT, but seems to me there's no point at all running around covering and uncovering at this time of year. It doesn't seem to me like it's worth it unless you're a week or two away from needing to burn it, so September/October might be a different equation. I did find that heavily ice and snow-encrusted splits dried out completely in a matter of hours around the edge of the hearth, and in two or three days stacked loosely on the other side of the room. Each to his own, but I'd far rather fuss with it that way than cover/uncover/cover multiple cords of wood every few days in the winter.

 

[gyrfalcon]

If you would take the time to split the wood one more time and take a reading, I think you would be surprised of what different readings you get. The inside of the split is the "true" moisture reading. There is no need to split them all again, maybe just one or two different types of wood from different parts of the stack.

Well, my splits are pretty much all 4 to 6 inches max, and I tested the rain-exposed long and short edges of the top splits, so I'd expect the rain effect to be stronger on the outside than the inside, no? As I say, it wasn't exactly a rigorous experiment, just a quick and dirty comparison. But I'll go do that just for the record-- um, as soon as it stops raining.

 

[N/A N/A]

Hope you get some dry weather up there soon. We been lucky around here I think. Good luck.

 

[gyrfalcon]

Hope you get some dry weather up there soon. We been lucky around here I think. Good luck.

The vegetables love it, though, especially potatoes. I dug up some "new" potatoes a couple days ago, and they were the size of supermarket russets already. Gonna be real monsters by fall.

 

[Adios Pantalones]

the tomatoes refuse to ripen for me, but the annual flood of zukes and squash is in full swing.

 

[BurningIsLove]

the tomatoes refuse to ripen for me, but the annual flood of zukes and squash is in full swing.

Yeah no kidding.....Im gonna turn into a zucchini or squash any day now, every meal Im having some trying to shake up the preparation style. Gotten like 3 tomatoes all year and they were tiny.

Hot peppers in the same boat as the tomatoes.....lots of growth but no fruit/peppers

 

[gyrfalcon]

the tomatoes refuse to ripen for me, but the annual flood of zukes and squash is in full swing.

Yeah no kidding.....Im gonna turn into a zucchini or squash any day now, every meal Im having some trying to shake up the preparation style. Gotten like 3 tomatoes all year and they were tiny.

Hot peppers in the same boat as the tomatoes.....lots of growth but no fruit/peppers

You guys need to move to a better climate-- up north! I've had a fair number of ripe plum tomatoes already, cherry toms ripening well (although late for sure), and vast numbers of regular tomatoes, although none turning color yet. Zuke and winter squash are clearly bent on world domination, and I've had to hack some of their arms off to keep them from strangling the rest of the garden.

I've learned though never to plant more than one zuke for every 10 people or so.

 

[Rockey]

Not a particularly rigorous experiment, but sure enough to convince me that moving air is the key to drying, not heat per se, and covering stacks is pointless unless you're in a really rainy climate .

I see two problems with this reasoning.

1 - If heat wasn't important to drying then kilns wouldn't need heat to remove moisture from lumber so quickly, they would just use fans on the lumber to dry them. The fact is that wehn water evaporates it removes evnergy in the form of heat from the wood. If sufficient heat is present for the wood to reabsorb and allow more moisture to evaporate then the process can be expedited. This is proven by the amount of time it takes to bring wood down to 8-10% desired level. There is a direct relationship between the temperature and the amount of time it takes to dry wood.

2 - If you chose not to cover your wood when it rains then you not only let the wood rebsorb the moisture, albeit free moisture and not cell bound, it still takes X amount of time for it to get back to its original MC, whereas if it was covered that X amount of time will be spent further drying the wood below its previous MC.

 

[gyrfalcon]

Not a particularly rigorous experiment, but sure enough to convince me that moving air is the key to drying, not heat per se, and covering stacks is pointless unless you're in a really rainy climate .

I see two problems with this reasoning.

1 - If heat wasn't important to drying then kilns wouldn't need heat to remove moisture from lumber so quickly, they would just use fans on the lumber to dry them. The fact is that wehn water evaporates it removes evnergy in the form of heat from the wood. If sufficient heat is present for the wood to reabsorb and allow more moisture to evaporate then the process can be expedited. This is proven by the amount of time it takes to bring wood down to 8-10% desired level. There is a direct relationship between the temperature and the amount of time it takes to dry wood.

2 - If you chose not to cover your wood when it rains then you not only let the wood rebsorb the moisture, albeit free moisture and not cell bound, it still takes X amount of time for it to get back to its original MC, whereas if it was covered that X amount of time will be spent further drying the wood below its previous MC.

GOod points. But when we're talking about outside seasoning of firewood, we're not talking the high temps of a kiln, we're just talking summertime climate. So not saying heat has no role whatsoever, just that the drying effect of air circulation appears to be a good deal stronger than the heat of the sun. It was a lot warmer on my south-facing porch than it was outside last week, yet the stuff outside in the wind and a couple more inches of rain rain has dried noticeably faster.

Covering stacks of three or four cords of wood every time it threatens to rain and then uncovering it again over and over and over again is more effort than it's worth under normal circumstances, is my conclusion for now, although I can certainly be persuaded otherwise. And although it's intuitive that wood would stop seasoning while it's losing absorbed rain water, do we know for a fact that that's the case? Physics doesn't always work in the ways that seem obvious-- at least not to me. I'm not clear that cell-bound and free moisture are subject to the same processes. Maybe the free moisture makes the cell walls more porous and actually helps the cell-bound moisture to leak out and evaporate more quickly. I have no idea. Does anybody? We're all going on a mixture of assumptions and customs and experience and what seems like common sense, but before I go to the additional effort of tarping and untarping, I'd like some hard evidence that it actually makes more than an insignificant difference.

So far, in my many decades of dealing with water-wet wood (oh, OK, about a year), it's been my experience that it dries out way faster than it's possible to imagine looking at a sodden piece of maple, both in winter and in summer.

 

[Rockey]

Not a particularly rigorous experiment, but sure enough to convince me that moving air is the key to drying, not heat per se, and covering stacks is pointless unless you're in a really rainy climate .

I see two problems with this reasoning.

1 - If heat wasn't important to drying then kilns wouldn't need heat to remove moisture from lumber so quickly, they would just use fans on the lumber to dry them. The fact is that wehn water evaporates it removes evnergy in the form of heat from the wood. If sufficient heat is present for the wood to reabsorb and allow more moisture to evaporate then the process can be expedited. This is proven by the amount of time it takes to bring wood down to 8-10% desired level. There is a direct relationship between the temperature and the amount of time it takes to dry wood.

2 - If you chose not to cover your wood when it rains then you not only let the wood rebsorb the moisture, albeit free moisture and not cell bound, it still takes X amount of time for it to get back to its original MC, whereas if it was covered that X amount of time will be spent further drying the wood below its previous MC.

GOod points. But when we're talking about outside seasoning of firewood, we're not talking the high temps of a kiln, we're just talking summertime climate. So not saying heat has no role whatsoever, just that the drying effect of air circulation appears to be a good deal stronger than the heat of the sun. It was a lot warmer on my south-facing porch than it was outside last week, yet the stuff outside in the wind and a couple more inches of rain rain has dried noticeably faster.

Covering stacks of three or four cords of wood every time it threatens to rain and then uncovering it again over and over and over again is more effort than it's worth under normal circumstances, is my conclusion for now, although I can certainly be persuaded otherwise. And although it's intuitive that wood would stop seasoning while it's losing absorbed rain water, do we know for a fact that that's the case? Physics doesn't always work in the ways that seem obvious-- at least not to me. I'm not clear that cell-bound and free moisture are subject to the same processes. Maybe the free moisture makes the cell walls more porous and actually helps the cell-bound moisture to leak out and evaporate more quickly. I have no idea. Does anybody? We're all going on a mixture of assumptions and customs and experience and what seems like common sense, but before I go to the additional effort of tarping and untarping, I'd like some hard evidence that it actually makes more than an insignificant difference.

So far, in my many decades of dealing with water-wet wood (oh, OK, about a year), it's been my experience that it dries out way faster than it's possible to imagine looking at a sodden piece of maple, both in winter and in summer.

Just for the record I believe that heat and air circulation are both equally as important. Although we are not dealing with a kiln the point it illustrates cannot be ignored. It requires both heat and good circulation to facilitate good seasoning or drying. You had both heat and wind in your wood left outdoors and just heat for the sample left on the screened in porch.

I actually have seen data that clearly illustrates how wood reabsorbs moisture after rains. It was a sample taken by I believe the Division of Forestry (don't remember which state). If I can find the graphs again they are similar to gas prices. Up like a rocket and down like a parachute. The wood will eventually dry but if you are trying to expedite the process then it will benefit you to cover the wood.