For everybody who has asked, the wood was tested legitimately, yep fresh split, center, temperature, prong direction, all that. Now, do I believe the wood is actually that dry? No, I don't. Pushing any measuring device to the edges of its range is the recipe for large errors. Plus, a consumer grade MM is not what I would consider a "scientific instrument". But if you double the readings from 3 to 6%, just to be safe, it's still mighty dry! In this particular case, the wood being so extremely dry by every other form of observation, is what led me to go get the MM just to see what it would read.
I notice there's a pattern to these dry wood reports:
- Rocky Mountain region, usually northern
- Lodgepole pine - normally standing dead in the sun
- September/October
It's not every year (thank God), but this region can have very dry summers, and winters are typically cold with very low RH, so there's a "freezer burn" effect. Dry snow doesn't stick to standing trees, and the weather can switch from snow to dry in June, without a rainy period. We haven't seen a raindrop hardly since October, and were it not for the chest deep snow, this time of year (April) is a great time to harvest dead and take it straight to the stove. The high wood is probably just above 10%. If it falls into a plowed road, the stove is where it's going! Anything standing dead above head high (where it's not exposed to the ground snow melt) is going to be really really dry by fall if there's no wet snow or rain during the summer.
And then, some years there are regular sloppy wet snows through the summer that sticks to everything, soaks in to standing stuff better than rain, and is Mother Nature's fire proofing! Good to have what you need before things turn wet or be at least a year ahead in those!
Lodgepole pine tends to be small diameter, and usually grows with one substantial very deep crack in it, so the standing dead is somewhat pre-split.
I have lived in the southern Cascades, and the Sierras, before meters were a thing, and while the summers are wicked hot and dry, I don't see these reports from there or the West Coast in general. While you sure don't have to season dead wood there after you've spent half the summer fighting to keep it from going up in flames, I think that much larger trees, that don't grow split like lodgepole, and have real bark and sap and the other things lodgepole doesn't, combined with warmish, humid winters, probably limit how dry most of the wood gets, even if it doesn't rain much for years.
And yes, as mentioned above, if it's a year where there's any unfrozen water available in the fall, I can tell that the super-dry wood gains moisture once it's put in the stack. I try to burn what I can of it before it gets wetter, because the heat output is incredible vs. the volume of wood burned. Works great for a small shoulder season fire, but more than just a couple of pieces is more than my cat stove especially can deal with the smoke from.