btuser said:
The only problem with pine is that it burns-too good. That's why people have problems. You can split a pine log, walk inside and start a fire with it when its sopping wet. That's why it gets a bad rap, because it burns wet, which allows us to get into trouble. Oak doesn't...
Not to disrespect your experience, but I don't see how that's possible. Pine has some of the highest moisture content of any green wood. White pine is up about 150% MC, and sugar pine is up over 200%. Wood at 200% MC is 2/3 water and only 1/3 wood fiber by weight. Oak is around 80% MC when first cut. That means it is about 45% water by weight.
So how is it that wood that is 66% water burns and wood that is 44% water doesn't? Green oak will burn. In fact, it is the wood of choice to use in a wood-fired firewood kiln. Why burn up the valuable product you are making when the cheap stuff works?
I never burned green pine, but I have burned green popple. Popple is the one hardwood that is up there in MC along with pine - about 160%. "Burn" hardly describes what went on in my stove. Personally, I'd much rather burn green oak. But 4-5 days sitting by my stove and the popple was less than half it's original weight and burned hot as hell... for a very brief time, I might add. Oak in the identical situation would still burn about as poorly as when it was first cut. So, yes, I'm sure you can "burn" green pine, but you'll need to give the stove all the air it can suck to keep it going, and it won't burn fast, so you won't get much heat at all.
I don't mind being the odd man out in my thinking, some here's my take:
When air-tight stoves first came out, the exciting thing for all us idiots was the ability to shut the air almost all the way down and get extremely long burns. I remember when my housemates brought home the Ashley, they were all glowing about how you could shut the air down to an opening smaller than a dime. We added a pipe damper to close it down even more. And we made a ton of creosote, even with good dry wood. My feeling since then is that the only real enemy is not enough air. That's the number one thing in an EPA stove - you can't shut the air way down like in the old stoves (except maybe in a cat stove, and you can't burn wet wood in a cat stove), so they will burn cleaner by nature compared to a choked-down smoke dragon. Secondaries burns are nice, and they allow you to shut the air down farther than you could in a smoke dragon and still get a clean burn. In most of the old air-tight stoves stoves we had two strikes against us. The lack of secondary combustion and the morons behind the wheel choking the air all the way down - a perfect retort for creosote formation.
Picture a load of bone-dry pine thrown into a raging hot smoke dragon just before bed. You hear the fire take off, so you shut the air down all the way, adjust the pipe damper so that just a whiff of smoke comes out the door when it is open, and you go to bed. The next morning, you wake up to a cold house. The wood is all gone, so you curse the pine, start another fire and begin the cycle again. And you vow to try to find some oak in the future.
What you didn't see inside the black box was that the dry pine hit those hot coals and instantly gave up vast amount of wood gases. With the air shut down, their wasn't enough oxygen to consume all of this smoke and it went up the stack until it hit a spot lower than 212ºF and began to condense on the flue walls as creosote. Yes, even oven-dried wood at 0% MC will create vast amounts of creosote when there isn't enough air to burn off the wood gases. Making matters worse, with the air shut down and the pipe damper engaged, the intake velocity was low and turbulence was drastically decreased, causing poor air/gas mixing and contributing greatly to incomplete combustion.
Now picture a load of green oak going into the same old raging hot dragon. We hear right away that the stove isn't going well. We leave the air open all the way, the damper as well. Eventually, the fire starts to take off, but never so good that we shut the air down all the way. We leave the pipe damper open as well, and when the fire is going OK, we slip off to bed. The next morning, we wake up to a warm house and a nice bed of coals. We praise the Lord for providing good wood like oak, and vow to never burn pine again.
What we didn't see inside the black box was that the wet oak hit those hot coals and instantly cooled the stove down due to it's slow ignition and thermal mass. The water in the wood started to bubble out and made matters worse, but if the fire was hot enough in the beginning and we gave it enough air, it eventually got ignited and burned slowly throughout the night. Yes, we made a bunch of creosote, but counter-intuitively, not as much as the guy burning dry pine in a choked-down stove. That's how the old timers learned to burn green hardwood, and it's why so many of them are so stubborn when it comes to their burn practices, and why the EPA came into the picture in the first place. When you give these old coots like me a modern stove, it just won't work for them. They'll never get enough pyrolysis going on with that wet wood to get secondary combustion, and when they shut that bypass damper down, the wet wood just won't burn at all. Eventually, they will learn that they need drier wood in order to get a regulated burn in an EPA stove.
IMHO, pine burns hot and fast when dry. Fast burning wood emits wood gases faster, that's what's really burning, not the wood itself. In an EPA stove, with it's secondary combustion and inability to be closed down tall the way, it should burn fine if you use a little caution and don't split the dang stuff too small. For me, it's too much handling and fussing, even if it's free. I buy almost all my wood because I don't own a wood lot and don't feel like buying a truck and going around scrounging for wood at my age. At close to 6 full cord a year, it's still under $1000/yr. Heck, my cigar budget is higher than that. My time is valuable, something young bucks don't get until it's too late to get it back. I go for convenience, so I buy the densest wood I can find and pay what it costs. Only way I'd heat with pine or popple is if that was all that grew around here
An a bonus. A little less than 1 cord already split. Good day
