Sticks

[velvetfoot]

Well, I'm trying to clean up all the branches that came with the dead tree that was cut down. I'm attempting to burn a good part of the little 'sticks' too. My first impression is that it is a lot of work for not much heat, but I have to clean it up anyway and the other way is to just haul them into the woods. I might give up, since it really is a lot of work. I wonder how much stuff falls from trees naturally in the course of a year and how much of that could be used to heat a house, albeit with a lot of effort.

 

[Jay H]

I use all the oak twigs that fall off the many oak trees that surround my property as kindling. I'll just collect them, break them into usable twigs and put them in my kindling bin.. Anything larger that I can't break over my knee, I will cut using a tree saw and stack them by my wood pile to dry and season for kindling later.

Jay

 

[Gooserider]

I pick up and toss in the "kindling bay" of my woodshed any sticks bigger around than my thumb or thereabouts. The rest I either chip up when I run over them with the lawn mower or ignore or pick up and throw on my brush pile, depending on how I feel about them. It's a bit of a judgement call - I look at how many cuts I have to make for a burnable stick - more than about three or four and it's off to the brush pile.

I use a bypass lopper and / or hand pruning shears to get anything less than about 2" in diameter down to length, above that it goes into the chainsaw pile. (I'll pile a bunch of thin stuff in the sawbuck and do several at once)

Mostly I use it in getting the fire going and for re-starts as needed.

Gooserider

 

[velvetfoot]

I don't think my lopper goes to 2" - more like 1.5".
I am piling so of it in my garage, where I can use the electric saw at night - and listen to mlb homeplate on xm.

 

[colsmith]

I am lazy (don't want to drag them away) and hate to waste anything, so we save and burn a lot of sticks that come along with the bigger stuff. They are great kindling when starting or rebuilding a fire. Right now we seem to have an awful lot of them. Where we used to just put in a few as needed, we are now quite generous with them. I tried making a fire with just a large number of sticks, oops, burned quite hot and fast and made me almost nervous about its vigor. We store them in the flimsy wooden crates such as corn on the cob and green beans come in, since I get those frequently from a local produce stand. We just pile the crates up near the woodpiles, so they don't take up valuable space or anything. We keep one in the house near the stove and another on the porch next to the wood stored there, so there are always some dry ones. They do seem to give off heat just fine, but there is a big PIA factor. We scrounge our wood as well as cutting some of our own, have lots of free time, so it is worthwhile for us. Your mileage may vary. If you bought split cords of wood you would probably wish you had some of these, because some really small kindling is essential to get a fire going in our soapstone stove.

 

[rudysmallfry]

I couldn't exist without kindling. I frequently start up from dead cold and need the much smaller stuff to heat up the flue and establish good draft before adding the big stuff. I keep all my smaller twigs. It's an ugly pile to look at, but a necessary one.