Do you de-bark?

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cannonballcobb

cannonballcobb

Member
May 4, 2008
90
ATL
I have mostly oak in my wood pile. I find that when I'm ready to bring wood inside, if I chip the bark off with a hatchet, I wind up bringing less bugs and moths into the house.

Does anyone else do this, or am I just wasting fuel?
 
sometimes i do sometimes i dont.
depends on the split/bark.....
and your not really wasting fuel... for the most part the bark is not great in the BTU department and normally known to have moisture and hamper your
total heat output slightly.
if it wants off, i'm ok with that.
 
Most of my rounds have the bark fall off when I split them.
I haven't split oak green in quite a while.

I once had a cat that couldn't meow, though.
 
I thought it was disembark....

I tend to let the rounds sit for a while before I can get around to splitting them. After they have dried for a while, a lot of the bark falls off. I don't really like it as it probably slows down the seasoning process a little, but I don't worry about it. I do collect it up and let it dry under cover for a while. It burns, but doesn't last long and creates buckets of ashes in the process. I just burn it to get rid of it...

Chris
 
Never debark; bark that falls off, pick it up and burn it. We have a pet bat. Really hard to find inexpensive bat food, but found that the moths and flying bugs were enough to keep it happy.
 
I wish I could De-Bark my Australian Shepherd !!
 
Down in Atlanta it's probably warm enough so the bugs don't go dormant. Up here once you split the critters disappear in 7/10 days or so but flys do come alive occasionally cause they hide in the bark. but not enough flys to go threw de-barking though...if I see bark is lose enough to pull off we'll do that and throw it in the kindling box. Sounds very labor intensive do you have a trick or special tool for doing that?
 
If it falls off while outside it goes into my firepit. Other than that it goes into the stove still attached to the split.
 
cannonballcobb said:
savageactor7 said:
Sounds very labor intensive do you have a trick or special tool for doing that?
Click to expand...

Nope. Just 1 hit with the hatchet and the bark on seasoned oak pops right off.
Click to expand...

HUH! that pretty amazing to hear that...but yeah a lot of our bark just sheds off in the wood tent I jsut never thought about it that way.

I've never burned oak and have only very recently discovered them growing on our land. The bark looks very much like elm bark...would you agree with that. My neighbor ID'd it as 'white oak' and he's a pro tree guy.
 
Down in the South, Red Oak is more common. I do have some White Oak as well, although the bark on the Red comes off easier.

If you have the chance to burn White Oak, do it! BTUs are some of the highest and White Oak coals for a looooong time.
 
I get rid of it if I can.
 
cannonballcobb said:
If you have the chance to burn White Oak, do it! BTUs are some of the highest and White Oak coals for a looooong time.
Click to expand...

Well about 6 years ago or so I started to notice some white oak saplings and I've marked them off with engineer tape so I don't brush hog or trample 'em during winter wood cutting. We only have one tree that's fit to harvest, I've been driving by it for years and never noticed it. Can't cut it cause I call it the Mother tree...the bark looks like elm that's why I was asking and yes I'm looking forward to burning oak someday.
 
Debarking wood . . . sounds like a lot of unnecessary work -- I guess I would rather devote the time spent debarking wood on cutting, splitting and stacking next year's wood. If the bark falls off I throw it aside for use as kindling . . . otherwise the wood goes into the stove bark and all. To date, bugs haven't been an issue and excessive ash hasn't been a major problem either.
 
I hear ya. Yeah, if it weren't for the months that get in our house I wouldn't worry about the bark either.
I guess our climate in the Fall and Spring is not cold enough to keep the critters out of the fire wood.
 
Since I only cut standing dead, I often debark in the woods. With pinon it actually goes quite fast if you stand a log on end.
 
de-barking - sometimes I'd kinda like to do that to my dog - just kidding

if the bark falls off, then it is debarked, otherwise bark stays on, too much work to intentionally debark
 
I'm burning lots of pine in these shoulder months and none of it has bark (just happened to fall off before/during splitting). I have had several fires, and have not had to clean out ash. Maybe I've burned less wood (pounds), but definitely less bark. Pine also tends to have lighter/fluffier ash that carries through my wood kiln easily- maybe some gets sucked up in the draft as well. I dunno.
 
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