Ready for Winter Down Under

[Apprentice_GM]

G'day again everyone! Having been inspired by the good folks in this forum over the past few years to c/s/s hard and get ahead, I'd like to submit my humble inventory of firewood coming into the Aussie Winter 2011.

Roughly 150 feet total length by about 4 foot high on average with an estimated average of 18 inches (50m x 1.2m x .45m) I reckon I have just over 7 cords, but probably closer to 8 because I was a little conservative in my estimate of split length (I prefer 24" long rounds / splits but some of the stuff is scrounged from neighbours who bucked it short, even down to 12" lengths for some big (2' + diameter) rounds). About 1.5 cords has been seasoned for 3 years / 4 summers, 2 cords for 2 years / 3 summers and the rest was fresh last spring so has only had one summer. I am hoping it is 3 years worth, maybe 4 - having actually done an inventory I will know my usage much more accurately after this wood burning season coming up.

I'm still in awe of you guys who c/s/s that much for EVERY winter and are further ahead than I am! The benefits of a fairly temperate climate I guess.

By the way, 3 of the sections are North-South and most is East West and for those of you who recall my Holz Hausen vs Ricks seasoning experiment, yes, I am actually going to check the seasoning differences of that too

Some pics:

 

[Adios Pantalones]

Good to see ya back here bud. Good looking stacks

 

[soupy1957]

Sure have a good head start (fair dinkum) on the cold, eh?! As long as you could stay away from the flooding and Cyclones........geez!!


-Soupy1957

 

[Apprentice_GM]

Sure have a good head start (fair dinkum) on the cold, eh?! As long as you could stay away from the flooding and Cyclones........geez!!

-Soupy1957

How bizarre was the weather we had a couple of weeks ago eh - you heard about it obviously! We had flooding in Queensland, Northern NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, with bushfires in South WA and a cyclone in North WA, and the next week Queensland got hit by a Category 5 cyclone (320 kmh winds, ~170 knots or 200 mph) whilst we in NSW had a record heatwave with 7 days over 35 degrees C in Sydney (and hotter further inland) and most days over 100 F! The whole time the centre of Oz was over 120 degrees F . . . I actually played cricket in 44 deg C (111 F) which is quite ridiculous.

We have a poem here by Dorothy Mackellar which starts "I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of jagged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains." Yeah, and cyclones, heatwaves, locust plagues, etc.

Mind you, tornados look scarier!

Stay warm everyone

 

[Apprentice_GM]

Good to see ya back here bud. Good looking stacks

AP! Doing any big pottery firings? I guess I'd have enough for 2 of your firings now!

 

[SolarAndWood]

Your panoramic shot makes it look like the Great Wall. Enjoy your winter.

 

[Adios Pantalones]

Fired this past weekend- It beat me up pretty good. Won't open the kiln until Saturday

 

[thewoodlands]

Nice looking inventory, what type of wood do you have in the stacks.



Zap

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Looks like you've been plenty busy. I hope you get that satisfied feeling once the work is done and you can stand back and admire the wood pile! Its great.

 

[Apprentice_GM]

Nice looking inventory, what type of wood do you have in the stacks.

Zap

I've actually got an Excel spreadsheet (no, really! ) breaking down all the sections by length, species of wood, summers seasoned etc. Just about all the fresh stuff that looks red is bluegum (my favourite timber - my house floorboards are bluegum, I have a big desk which is a bluegum slab, and it's easy to split and burns great too - nice hot coals with moderate ash) and half the seasoned stuff is too (so ~4.5 cords in bluegum). The rest is paperbark (just under 1 cord) and some mixed species from scrounging I'm not too sure of - aussie hardwoods of some type.

Knowing I was going to get at least 3 summers seasoning I split the fresh bluegum fairly big to reduce handling and improve overnight burns. I'm working up to the ability to think "hmmm, moderately cool night, want a long overnight burn but coals for the morning" and select the right species and size of splits to get it just right

Hope everyone here is warm and dry!

 

[Jags]

Glad to see your set to go. If I could, I would gladly tilt this big blue rock a month or two early to get you out of the heat waves.

 

[Delta-T]

weird...I dont see any wood stacks....but thats a heck of a fence you got there..looks a bit like a defensive structure. ;-)

 

[Apprentice_GM]

Looks like you've been plenty busy. I hope you get that satisfied feeling once the work is done and you can stand back and admire the wood pile! Its great.

Yeah, hired a big log splitter over a 4 day weekend during the Christmas break and went hard - must have run the machine for 20 hours plus in 4 days. Rolling around massive rounds takes it toll. I don't know how people "in the old days" and even today can c/s/s a cord of wood on their own in a day with an axe / maul / hand saw. I was flat out doing 3-4 cords in 4 days with the hydraulic splitter, and that was only splitting and stacking!

I make a point of regularly walking around my "defensive structure / wooden fence" and admiring my work Very satisfying!

I don't think they season as fast, but I like N-S running ricks, where the splits are E-W, because it gets even seasoning on both ends and my ricks stand straight, whereas E-W ricks season and shrink faster on the northern end so it leans to the North and sometimes topples. I have to encourage the ricks with a sledgehammer to stand tall and straight occasionally.

I have a big bluegum I need to drop but am going to wait for some fence real estate to be freed up.

As for the offer of getting us out of heatwaves, good luck with that - we seem to be getting more and more extreme weather events Down Under these days. Whether that's man-caused climate change at work or not is probably another thread topic, but all I know is, I love that wood burning is "carbon neutral" other than my petrol / gas useage for transport and saw and splitter, even though it's hard work it's worthwhile - I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted here!