Starting from scratch, dry pine vs wet oak

[peakbagger]

The market price adjusts to meet the demand. We had a cold November and folks who under planned are running out. Bad time to be buying wood Entrepreneurs are stepping in and charging what the market will bear and some are outright lying that they are selling seasoned wood. Wait until spring or summer and the prices will come down somewhat.

Just realize there are few folks who earn a living full time cutting, splitting, seasoning and delivering firewood. If they do they tend to sell to a very well defined customer list that will buy year to year. They don't advertise and don't need to. The vast majority of folks who sell wood do it part time and few are going to have the forethought to have it sitting around for the time required to season it when folks are desperate to buy it now. My guess southern NH is turning into an area where there really is more demand for firewood then the casual suppliers out there can support. I think folks in Southern NH are probably better off chasing tree service wood but that means cutting and splitting. There is a local business in Gorham that has fallen on hard times and I see what I think is the owner outside with someone else with a pile of logs cutting and splitting wood, piling it on pallets and shrink wrapping the pallet. He has $135 on the bundle which is probably a tight half cord and the bundles don't stay there long. The woods not seasoned as it was just was cut from a long length and its not going to season much with shrink wrap. I expect once he pays his tax bill, his business picks up or the demand goes down he will go onto other things.

 

[billb3]

Oak can take a long time to dry. I'd rather have red maple or cherry as it seasons quicker. Especially with time constraints.
I burn about a cord of eastern white pine a year. A little more this year. It's my first load in the morning and when it isn't quite so cold outside and I'm not pushing the stove to make a lot of heat I'll let the coals burn down quite a ways then throw three sticks of pine on a raked flat coal bed and put 3 splits of oak on top of that. Repeat. I'll even burn pine during the day sometimes but with a smaller stove I'm refilling every two hours or so. It can be a lot of heat though.

 

[Mt Ski Bum]

I burn almost nothing but pine-family species (juniper is the only one I burn outside the pine family)- Lodgepole Pine, Whitebark Pine, Limber Pine, Douglas Fir, Subalpine Fir, & occasionally Ponderosa Pine or Engelmann Spruce. No problems with it here!

 

[HisTreeNut]

I would get both, and get more pine. The pine will be fine to stack outdoors at 22% and be burnable in the Fall. Just top cover with a tarp or plastic of some kind. As for the oak, I would split it smaller, criss-cross stack it and get that stacked in the garage, with the fan blowing through it all Spring, Summer, and Fall. It might be usable by late winter. If you have to burn it, mix it with pine, 2 pine to 1 oak.
I have a Buck 94-NC which does does well with most any wood (seasoned) as we we heat about 2200' exclusively with it. I burn pine, poplar, maple, oak...whatever I can scrounge. I get a lot more soft wood as no one wants it. Eastern Pineaphobia is alive and well in the Southeast also. In the Fall and Spring, I burn soft woods, but during the winter I mix the hard and soft wood as I get the best results with a mix of wood. In really cold weather (15 and below), I will burn just hardwood. Granted, being in NC, I do not get the cold most folks up North get. YMMV and good luck with it.