Holz Hausen Photos

[WarmGuy]

Here are the photos as it was built...

 

[WarmGuy]

-

 

[WarmGuy]

Completed pile, with photo of the top. It's eight feet tall.

 

[mayhem]

Thats pretty cool. Looking at the other post you put up I'm guessing this is facilitate curing, right? Is there another purpose besides making somehting more aesthetically pleasing than a rectangular stack?

 

[myzamboni]

It's to protect that little tree in the middle :lol:

 

[begreen]

It is a different way of stacking to conserve space and dry wood a bit faster. Making one became last year's summer challenge. There were some pretty successful stacks and a few collapses too. If you do a search on Holz Hausen you'll find several threads. Here's a few:

https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/1630/
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/1726/
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/4253/

 

[ourhouse]

Nice work it looks good

 

[titan]

Nice job Warmguy, how many man-hours into that?

 

[Todd]

Hate to burst your bubble, but your HH looks like it's going to collapse due to the top looking wider than the bottom and it also looks like there is a bulge on the right side. When that wood starts to dry, settle and shrink it can become very unstable, believe me, it happened to me last year and it was no fun restacking an 8' HH.

 

[Highbeam]

I didn't want to rain on the parade either but that next to last photo looks like it's already blowing out. You wouldn't catch me standing too close to that, or parking a truck next to it, or letting my kids get close.

 

[WarmGuy]

Hate to burst your bubble, but your HH looks like it's going to collapse due to the top looking wider than the bottom and it also looks like there is a bulge on the right side. When that wood starts to dry, settle and shrink it can become very unstable, believe me, it happened to me last year and it was no fun restacking an 8' HH.

Good call. The the top half of the right side collapsed a few hours after I took the shot. Here's a shot of it after I rebuilt it.

The bulge on the left may go at some point.

Next time I'm going to taper in towards the middle starting at the base. For this one I tried to make the sides vertical.

Hard to say how many hours it took to build it originally, since I built it as I split. I did it mostly because I'm running out of space to put my firewood, but partly for the fun. When it gets over 7 feet or so, progress slows down. You either have to take each log up the ladder, or toss them up and go up the ladder to rearrange.

 

[Todd]

After mine collapsed last year I rebuilt it 7' tall, 8' wide at the base and 6' wide at the top. Never had a problem after that, and the wood dried pretty well throughout.

 

[tw40x81]

I'm stacking a holz, 10 ft in diameter. With knowledge of the the blowouts here, I'm attempting to avoid the problem by stacking the wood on the inside on end from the center out, with a slight tilt toward the center. The whole thing is kind of spiraling up nicely. I plan on it being 10 ft high, as long as I don't run out of wood.

 

[begreen]

That's going to be eine Uber Hausen!

 

[tw40x81]

Look here for some pictures of jaw dropping REALLY nice wood piles. It's in German, but you can use http://babelfish.altavista.com/ for a rough translation to some other common languages.

 

[BrotherBart]

Cafe du Holz Hausen:

 

[adrpga498]

Very nice start. One thing I learned was to keep the begining base for my next HH. I didn't deplete the entire HH as I burned. Made for an easy restart on my next HH.

 

[WarmGuy]

I plan on it being 10 ft high

As soon as mine got to about 7 ft, I found I had to either carry logs up the ladder two at a time, or toss a bunch up and rearrange. In any case, construction slows considerably at that point.

 

[tw40x81]

Well, as soon as it approach 7 feet, it collapsed. The center was stacked on end and the fill side was leaning away, and much of it went over. I restacked it laying things flat in the center. It might be as high as 8 ft high in the center now. The next one I stack, next year, will have two rows for the walls and things laying as flat as possible in the center.