Oregon wood addict

[Quielo]

I think I have a problem. I have a small hobby farm in southern Oregon. There is a depression where some dirt was excavated before we bought the place. My wife contacted the local tree service to dump wood chips there and they also dump whole trees. I just keep cutting the wood into firewood even if i already have way too much. Originally I used a 36" bow saw but I have since upgraded to a chainsaw. The wood comes in all sorts of species, oak, ash, doug fir, elm, madrone, pine, spruce. I feel compelled to cut all of it.

 

[begreen]

There are worse addictions. Watch out for carpenter ants and termites in the wood stacks around the house.

 

[Quielo]

There are worse addictions. Watch out for carpenter ants and termites in the wood stacks around the house.

I've mostly knocked the bark off anything near the house. Some of the softwood had a lot of bugs under the bark.

 

[begreen]

It's good to see blue skies there and not smoke. It looks pretty green there. Our grass is brown. Is this up near Grant's Pass?

 

[Quielo]

It's good to see blue skies there and not smoke. It looks pretty green there. Our grass is brown. Is this up near Grant's Pass?

Nearer to Roseburg. The blue skies depend on the wind direction, this is an ocean breeze day.

 

[stoveliker]

Hi Quielo,
welcome to the meeting. Unfortunately (or not) this club does not help you get rid of your addiction. We only drool seeing it in others too.

 

[Quielo]

Hi Quielo,
welcome to the meeting. Unfortunately (or not) this club does not help you get rid of your addiction. We only drool seeing it in others too.

Here is some more detail. The back is various softwoods, pine spruce, fir and cedar. The front in mainly hardwood. Yellow is Ash, Red = Madrone, green = Elm, and the purple on the bottom is Oak. I'm going to start putting the elm with softwood now.

 

[ericm979]

There are worse addictions. Watch out for carpenter ants and termites in the wood stacks around the house.

Also if a wildfire comes through those stacks will likely ensure that your house burns.

 

[stoveliker]

The wooden deck already does. It'll make no difference. (in my non-wildfire-educated opinion)

 

[ericm979]

There's a lot of deck materials that are class A. For example PT wood. I see some PT there in the deck.

But even if it's not, a deck that's clean and not got junk on it or between the boards that acts as kindling is not that easy to ignite from wind bourne embers. The embers are usually too small to ignite a 2x6 or similar. They need kindling. Most burnt houses that are not right next to something that's burning (i.e. another house) got ignited by embers finding some kindling or getting into vents. Stacks of firewood would provide a lot of places for embers to land and ignite a fire.

Fire fighters often do structure protection when a fire is approaching. The stacks of firewood make their job harder as there's now more to protect. They will move flammable stuff out of the way if they have time and there is not too much of it. What's shown there would likely be too much. Sometimes the FFs need to do triage based on a quick visual eval of the houses, leave the ones they think would be too hard and concentrate on the ones they can save. You want your house to be one of those.

I was a wildland fire fighter decades ago and more recently I have talked to a number of them and attended a number of their presentations on home hardening. They always say to remove anything flammable from under the deck.

In the end it's up to you and your appetite for risk. I don't know how much of a fire risk that area is but these days I assume essentially everywhere in the western US has a significant fire risk.

 

[sirlight]

You can have too much firewood? As long as you have space, keep cutting. Think of it as money in the bank. You can always sell a cord here and there if you need to.