Can firewood be dried faster set by the stove?

[Farenheit 451]

Rookie question as this is my first year. I have several cord of wood stacked from spring I’ve already been using. Today I came in and saw my wife had stacked oak and Hickory I’d cut and split just yesterday near the woodstove. She had checked with a moisture meter and said it was below 20%. I said impossible that it takes two years to dry oak but sure enough the meter didn’t lie and it was all 20% or lower from having sat next to the fireplace a mere 10 hours.

Is this a firewood life hack to dry split wood faster? I have no real need to at this point but wondered if somehow the meter is not the only test to safely avoid creosote from hidden moisture I’m not seeing? I already know to split what’s in here a second time and take that reading as well but wanted others thoughts on this process. Thanks!

 

[HisTreeNut]

That is the outside of the wood, not the inside. The outside of wood will lie to you every time. Never test the outside of a piece of wood for moisture content.
Split one of the pieces and test the "fresh cut" at the ends and the center. Average them. It probably won't be 20% (if it was recently cut & you just split it). 25%-28% would be my educated guess.

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[billb3]

Dead standing oak or green live oak ?

check it at room temp. maybe your meter is sensitive to high temps ?
two years of seasoning in 10 hours is highly unlikely

 

[maple1]

Something out of kilter here. 10 hours would have virtually no effect, aside from surface moisture.

 

[moresnow]

Today I came in and saw my wife had stacked oak and Hickory I’d cut and split just yesterday near the woodstove. She had checked with a moisture meter and said it was below 20%.

Soooo? Before she brought this wood inside she had selected a few splits for testing? She would of had to take the selected splits and re-split them in order to test the center of the newly exposed fresh face on the new smaller splits. Just a wild guess here but..... That's not the way she did it! Correct me if I am wrong. Could be!

 

[SpaceBus]

I had a few hundred pounds of firewood drying near my stove at all times last winter, it sucked. Each piece of wood took at least a week with lots of air gaps in the stacks to get to even a point it would burn when mixed with bio bricks. The firewood in question was spruce, fir, and birch. The birch was mostly in 4" or smaller rounds and had been sitting in an old blueberry field for years. The fir and spruce were from standing dead trees css a few months previous.

 

[Ashful]

That is the outside of the wood, not the inside. The outside of wood will lie to you every time. Never test the outside of a piece of wood for moisture content.

Ding, ding! We have a winner. Stacked a few feet from your stove is not that much different than being stacked in the sun on a hot day in July, there’s nothing magic happening, here.

 

[Chas0218]

I've set splits of cherry on end in front of the stove so if they fell over they wouldn't touch the stove and by the next day they dropped 3% or 4% in M.C. but never more than that. I mean if it is close to dry like 25% or closer then yeah it will dry it but anything more like 30% there is no way it will dry that fast.

I have a firewood bin next to my stove it holds about 1/6 cord (half of a face cord) maybe a little more and it will dry the wood a little nothing more than 5% and that is only a few pieces. I don't make a habit of trying to dry wood next to the stove it won't work very well compared to leaving outside for a year.

 

[maple1]

It can work quite well, if you also use a fan to move air across the wood. But still nowhere near the magnitude mentioned in the OP.

 

[Corey]

Well, 'kiln drying' is certainly a 'thing' and we know heat dries wood faster. Lots of studies published... lots of times listed. Pick any one. Seems like it's reasonable to get 50% moisture oak down to 20% in ~32 hours ... provided you can maintain 220ºF and 4% moisture in the surrounding 'kiln' / air. https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplrn/fplrn254.pdf (Results, Page 4)

The 'time' factor seems to scale almost exponentially... ~260 hours to dry if you can only maintain 140ºF. Of course, that could also scale for higher temps too... suggesting ~260ºF could to the job in 10 hours. Obviously at some point the wood just catches fire, but up to that point, you're drying!

So then it would go back to general questions:

How close to the stove was this wood?
How much had it dried before going close to the stove?
What is the ambient humidity?
How accurate is your moisture meter?
How good is your measuring technique?

Overall, this seems to be pretty far toward the extreme end of the scale. But if you had some moderate moisture content wood... say 30-35%...still to wet to burn. But parked it next to the stove for a week or so (couple hundred hours) and kept a fan blowing ~140ºF air on it, with already dry winter air, then I'd say it's conceivable to knock it down to 20% or so.

 

[Ashful]

Corey, note the way the 140dF curve flattens out, long before you reach 20%. The OP didn’t state their starting point, but even a kiln at 140dF is going to take a long time (not 32 hours) to reach 20% from... say 30% starting temperature. Then note the difference between the various temperature curves, and consider the projected curve at the temperature of the OPs room.

 

[Corey]

I did throw out a lot of numbers - but I think these are in line with what I quoted? ..looks like roughly:

260 hours @140ºF
92 hours @ 180ºF
32 hours @ 220ºF
10 hours @ 260ºF [admittedly my extrapolation of the above points for speculation... could be off]

Definitely would depend on the definition of "near the wood stove" and how hot that thing was running!

 

[sweedish]

I’ve keep about a 1/4 cord stacked in front off to the side of my insert, during the season, it’s lasts a week/10 days. Last year while dealing with 23% moisture content firewood, I did notice more end checking on the pieces after a few days in the stack.

I try to have whatever I bring in sit inside for a day, get rid of surface moisture and I think getting a piece of firewood to 451 is easier when it’s 65+ vs 10.

 

[maple1]

I did throw out a lot of numbers - but I think these are in line with what I quoted? ..looks like roughly:

260 hours @140ºF
92 hours @ 180ºF
32 hours @ 220ºF
10 hours @ 260ºF [admittedly my extrapolation of the above points for speculation... could be off]

Definitely would depend on the definition of "near the wood stove" and how hot that thing was running!

Air movement would play a large part. Usually indoor air is pretty dry in winter time. Adding a fan to the situation would help immensely.

 

[gerry100]

Agree with above comments, Cant believe there will be any effect past the surface

It actually requires heat to drive off moisture, similar impact to bringing a mass of cold wood into the room.

No free BTUs or lunch

 

[maple1]

Agree with above comments, Cant believe there will be any effect past the surface

It actually requires heat to drive off moisture, similar impact to bringing a mass of cold wood into the room.

No free BTUs or lunch

There can be effect, but it would take time. Can be fairly dramatic, with small splits and a fan moving air. But nowhere near dramatic as the OP. More like, noticeable improvement in a couple of weeks.

 

[Zack R]

This approach works well to dry off surface moisture, say if you dropped some splits in the snow while carrying them in. I doubt you would be able to actually season an acceptable quantity of wood this way.

 

[blacktail]

Moisture readings on a fresh split face are what count.
But it does dry in front of the stove. I sometimes stand a split in front of my insert if it feels heavier than the rest. One of my stack covers leaked at one end this year so 1-2 of those pieces sat in front of the stove occasionally. The ends crack and I can pick it up after a couple of hours and the hearth under it is wet from the moisture being driven out.

 

[Ashful]

Moisture readings on a fresh split face are what count.
But it does dry in front of the stove. I sometimes stand a split in front of my insert if it feels heavier than the rest. One of my stack covers leaked at one end this year so 1-2 of those pieces sat in front of the stove occasionally. The ends crack and I can pick it up after a couple of hours and the hearth under it is wet from the moisture being driven out.

Most of that moisture is still coming from just the outer fraction of an inch. But I’d also argue that while the MC% at the center of the split isn’t changing much, water is still water. Getting it out of the wood is going to improve the burn, whether it was extracted uniformly over years or quickly taken from closer to the surface. In fact, it is possible that moisture close to the surface that screws up the burn more than anything, when you’re trying to get a new load going and the secondary system is not yet “lit off”.