Burning Pine is it really ok?

[johneh]

We burn pine in our fire pit
the stove and furnace get hardwood at nearly twice the BTUs as Eastern white pine.
If all we had was softwood then that's what we have to burn
Hickory 27.7
Ironwood 27.1
Red Oak and Sugar Maple 24.0

Eastern White Pine 14.3
Pine is Ok to burn but has poor heat and fast burning
and baby it can get dam cold here

 

[Woody Stover]

What kind of wood makes good shingles/shakes? Hemlock? Spruce maybe? Seems like white pine would rot too fast.

Uh...Shingle Oak? 😏

I think that calling something {just) "pine" is misleading. There are many different "pines" and they burn differently. In life I've burned at least yellow pine, ponderosa pine, digger pine, sugar pine - whatever that might have been, and these days I burn almost exclusively lodgepole pine - because it's what I have. Lodgepole for instance, is nearly free of the resins that some other pines have in abundance (and unlike some of the other "pines" I've used, it splits easy too).

Eastern White Pine 14.3
Pine is Ok to burn but has poor heat and fast burning

I've not burned much Pine except for kindling, but I figured that different species might have more or less BTU.

 

[EbS-P]

Hm. Well, my (anecdotal) experience does not suggest that (pitch) pine, even when splits are half-way transparent fatwood, burns as long (mind you, with a thermostat, so the argument that it blows out the same BTUs in a shorter time, is (almost) completely negated) as red oak.

Based on that (burn time) I get a smaller difference than 17 vs 24 (MBTU/cord), but it's not the same for me. Of course statistics is poor for burn time, and error margins high.

Long leaf pine is dense and hard case in point. My plumber had to drill through floor joists. For 3” drain. He got through one. Then sent his helper to get a new hole saw and by the 6 th. Hole it was smoking and definitely not cutting fast.

Grain can be really tight on our mostly 60-80 year old trees.

It’s been said before if you need lots of heat burn pine. Faster burns with not much ash and less coaling allows for faster reloading, which equals more heat.

Now something like white pine is probably pass on. Not all line is the same.

 

[bigealta]

Long leaf pine is dense and hard case in point. My plumber had to drill through floor joists. For 3” drain. He got through one. Then sent his helper to get a new hole saw and by the 6 th. Hole it was smoking and definitely not cutting fast.

Grain can be really tight on our mostly 60-80 year old trees.

It’s been said before if you need lots of heat burn pine. Faster burns with not much ash and less coaling allows for faster reloading, which equals more heat.

Now something like white pine is probably pass on. Not all line is the same.

Yeah white pine does burn great in my jotul f400, excellent secondaries. But it burns up in no time. I'll maybe throw a piece in to help an oak load start faster but a stack of white pine in the yard is a waste of space compared to oak (red or white), or cherry, locust and even crappy silver maple.

 

[stoveliker]

Long leaf pine is dense and hard case in point. My plumber had to drill through floor joists. For 3” drain. He got through one. Then sent his helper to get a new hole saw and by the 6 th. Hole it was smoking and definitely not cutting fast.

Grain can be really tight on our mostly 60-80 year old trees.

It’s been said before if you need lots of heat burn pine. Faster burns with not much ash and less coaling allows for faster reloading, which equals more heat.

Now something like white pine is probably pass on. Not all line is the same.

I know the benefits of pine. Burned quite a bit, and will burn quite a bit next year. My stove does not burn pine faster than oak - thermostat based on heat output..
Faster reloading I do see, because there is (in my case) quite less energy content in the wood, even if my wood sometimes has 1/3 of a split all waxy and semitransparent from the sap. (i.e. fatwood).

I wonder, though, how much long leaf pine people are burning, as it is endangered. Lumber in old homes in the south may indeed be of this variety, but most pine forests in the Carolinas and Georgia are no longer long leaf pine variety.

All I wanted to say is that I understand sap increases the BTU content.
I don't know which pine has more sap, but I thought pitch pine was a candidate. (I see that similar to pitch pine, long leaf pine sap was used for maritime applications. Whalers here on Long Island made their boats water tight with it.) And with such a high-sap pine, I do not see a 40% increase in BTU (as measured by burning time at the same constant output) from 17M for my pine to reach red oak energy content of 24M. If you are burning long leaf pine, and you do see that, great. Send me some ;-)

 

[crstrode]

How about this, which is better (or worse, lol), burning pine, or burning poplar? If you had to choose a shoulder season wood between those two, which one would it be?

And I’m curious if the pine lovers are mostly cat stove owners or non cat stove owners.

I’m on the east coast and was always taught softwoods are bad for burning. Creosote in the chimney etc. Only after coming on this site did it really open up my eyes to what people in different areas burn.

There is a difference between being taught, and learning.
Sadly may teachers have only been taught, and never learned to learn.