Wood consumption so far - almost 1/4 of the season is over

[Tree farmer]

Glad to hear others running with no storage. For the added cost I could buy enough log length wood to heat my house for about 6 years or more. Poplar as us easteners call it is aspen as some have indicated. There is two types- trembling or quaking aspen and big tooth aspen and both have same wood properties. That is one reason I bought a gassifier so I can burn what I have on my woodlot - hemlock, red spruce and pine. Cut it, dry it, burn it and turn the stat up. The smoke from aspen burning in a regular woodstove really reaks though not sure why.

 

[Grover59]

I know this sounds stupid but I had to move what wood I had in the cellar from one area to another, when doing this I decided to count every stick I had to handle, this made it alomost fun. My wood is delivered all split and cut to 16 inches, and in one truck load I get a little over two cord, this load was a little less because I had used a little of it last year. As it turned out I counted 860 sticks, give or take a few, now when I load my boiler I will count the sticks I put in, if I have small stuff I just call two one, very basic. I set my timer one hour for every two sticks, so six sticks get 3 hours, and so on, you get the picuture. I have found that this has worked quite well, most of the time I end up with just a good coal bed when the timer kicks out, and my stack temp is on it way down.
So with this in mind, if I was to burn 20 sticks a day, with what I have out in that other room I should see about 43 days of wood, this is the worst, I know I will not be burning tha t much each day, but it is better to be on the safe side. I have a small house and we do kick the thermostat down during the day when no one is home. I only have about 5 cord of wood now for the season and last year I used a little less then that, but really cold weather could change that.

Steve

 

[penfrydd]

nofossil...red cedar? What elevation are you at? Red pretty much stops just south of here (Colrain, MA), and white doesn't start until just north of here. There are, of course, tons of juniper (pretty much same species as red, but seldom of firewood size). Poplar is just a weed. Burn it to stop it from spreading; give the better stuff more light to grow.

pybyr...I have to concur regarding hop hornbeam. It's not even on most firewood lists because there's not all that much of it, usually.

 

[Nofossil]

nofossil...red cedar? What elevation are you at? Red pretty much stops just south of here (Colrain, MA), and white doesn't start until just north of here. There are, of course, tons of juniper (pretty much same species as red, but seldom of firewood size). Poplar is just a weed. Burn it to stop it from spreading; give the better stuff more light to grow.

pybyr...I have to concur regarding hop hornbeam. It's not even on most firewood lists because there's not all that much of it, usually.

I'm at 450 feet, on the east side of the first ridge coming out of the Champlain valley into the Green Mountains. We're a climactic zone warmer than most of Vermont. Definitely Eastern Red Cedar - grows to about 12" diameter, tapers quickly, extremely convoluted trunks, flaky bark, pungent red heartwood. Got lots of white cedar, too.

I'm burning the poplar just because it seems more socially acceptable than leaving it on the lawn to rot. All of my firewood is a byproduct of woodlot management - culling undesirable, diseased, and damaged trees as well as invasive species.

 

[slowzuki]

I'm burning poplar now. It was stacked for 2 years in 4 foot chunks, unfortunately still wet. It drys quickly, losing 25% of its weight it just a few days inside after being split. Is adding needed moisture to the house. We have been having yo-yo temps, was -17 C yesterday morning, 10 C today.

This is my 3 rd year burning poplar. Its not a waste of time as it heats the house but it sure means a lot more work. Every so often I live the dream and toss some spruce or white birch in the stove lol, those would be a normal persons garbage wood!

 

[Eric Johnson]

I'm into a pile of mostly yellow birch that I segregated last spring because......well......because I wanted to see how it would be to burn nothing but yellow birch for awhile. When sufficiently dry, yellow birch seems superior to my other mainstays, which are beech and hard maple. One added benefit of yellow birch is that when it's nice and dry, the bark pops off and you can collect it for use as kindling and firestarter in the shoulder months. It not only burns like it's been soaked in kerosene, but has a beautiful smell reminiscent of incense. It's the wintergreen oil. The problem with YB is that it can be a bear to split, and it takes about 2 good years to dry. I've got a nice pile of ugly, unsplit rounds sitting in my backyard waiting for me to get motivated to get out there and get down to business. The big nasties are best split when it's near or below zero. And just to avoid confusion that you started, slowzuki, that's Fahrenheit.

 

[Nofossil]

I'm burning poplar now. It was stacked for 2 years in 4 foot chunks, unfortunately still wet. It drys quickly, losing 25% of its weight it just a few days inside after being split. Is adding needed moisture to the house. We have been having yo-yo temps, was -17 C yesterday morning, 10 C today.

This is my 3 rd year burning poplar. Its not a waste of time as it heats the house but it sure means a lot more work. Every so often I live the dream and toss some spruce or white birch in the stove lol, those would be a normal persons garbage wood!

I've found that poplar burns OK, just not as long. Mine is really dry - around 15%. The big problem is that it's so light I have to keep it tethered so it doesn't float away ;-)

 

[penfrydd]

Yellow birch better than beech and sugar maple??? I'm surprised. I used to burn exclusively black and white birch on a farm in Connecticut 25 years ago. Clean, and easy splitting (6" rounds), but not nearly so many btu's as maple. I don't have much yellow birch so I won't comment on that other than my surprise.

I've got a couple of years of beech to go through before I use up all the beech bark diseased trees.

 

[Eric Johnson]

White birch is definitely inferior to YB, beech and sugar maple. I don't know anything about black birch. If you look at the firewood btu charts, beech, YB and hard mape all rate about the same, but in my limited experience, I get a longer burn from the birch than the other two. But as I said, it takes about twice as long to dry, so most people who have YB in their woodpile are burning it a little green. The bark burns just as well dry or green because of the oil it contains.

BTW, the cleanest burning wood of the three in an EKO 60 is the hard maple. It leaves a fine, white ash. The beech leaves a dirty-looking gray ash, while the YB is somewhere in between.

 

[Rick Stanley]

I ran a stroke de-limber on a job in Hollis N. H. once and we got into a lot of Black Birch. The stuff made the whole landing smell like mint.