Burning Heartwood

[rudysmallfry]

I've got quite a bit of heartwood from the Maple tree I scored last month. I'm thinking since it's so dense and heavy, that it probably gives off a ton of heat. Has anyone burned heartwood? Do it take longer to season than the splits? How does it burn?

 

[DeanBrown3D]

Don't you just split rounds up into splits, heart included, and throw them into the same pile?

 

[Eric Johnson]

I don't think it's appreciably denser, but it does dry out more quickly than sapwood. Presumably that's because it doesn't contain as much sap.

Interestingly enough, the value in hard maple is in the sapwood. When you get into what loggers and sawmillers consider prime hard maple territory, they look for heartwood about the diameter of a silver dollar on sawlogs, which is to say anything over 10 inches in diameter at the small end. Most run-of-the-woods hard maple has a lot more heartwood than that, but from a lumber perspective, the less the better.

 

[rudysmallfry]

The heart fell out of the centers of the rounds when we were splitting them. I've personally never seen that before. It is about the size of a silver dollar. I just figured it's makeup would result in it burning very hot. Guess I'll find out next season.

 

[suematteva]

Rudy,

We burn alot of those real monster sugar maples with that dark hardwood. It does have less sap as Eric said and will dry faster..If big piece you can see this when lobbing the maul into it.. At the end of a year or two of drying I did not notice a heat difference in comparing the sapwood to heartwood per se...