I've never built one but I did find this article. Building a Holz Hausen - How to Age Your Firewood the German Way
1. Get some pallets. Important to get the wood off the ground. Besides preventing moisture getting to the splits touching the ground this also drastically improves airflow. 2. Make a ring of firewood on top of the pallets. I use 4 pallets per hausen. Don't butt them up together tightly in order to maximize the size of the hausen. 3. Place new splits perpendicular to the ring. They should all be pointing downwards towards the center of the ring. This is what gives the hausen its stability. 4. As you start stacking, you will see that sometimes you lose that downward pitch. You can recreate that pitch by putting a split as a shim. Sometimes you need to do a few in a row, depends on the splits. 5. I cover my hausens with a tarp that is 8' x 9'. It has grommets and I drilled a hole on the end of some splits and put "C" hooks into them. Space them evenly around the hausen. You just want to cover the top and a tiny bit of the side. Don't buy a tarp that is too big that covers the sides. You need maximum airflow. 6. You can stick shorties and uglies in the center. When I first started building them I used to just toss them in. Now that I don't really have shorties or uglies I put regular full size splits and try to stack them tightly. You can stack them loosely if you like as that takes less effort. Things I learned: 1. Do not use plywood pallets like the one in the first pic. I thought by drilling holes I'd help prevent water from soaking into it. Wrong. They fail and I had to rebuild that stack twice because that corner got completely smushed. 2. I've transitioned to using plastic pallets. They are hard to come by for free and I was lucky to get as many as I did. So now I rely on one company who calls me every once in a while to give me one or two at a time. 3. I don't cover my stacks until Sep or Oct of the year I'm going to burn them. 4. I find making my splits rectangular in shape vs triangular works out better for stacking. Obviously I can't do 100% rectangular but I try to maximize it. 5. Do yourself a favor and do in flat ground. When you have it on a slope maintaining that downward angle towards the center is harder.
Thank you very much! Very nice how to! When I use 4 pallets, how tall should I go? Thinking 4-5 ft high? Do you know how much wood a typical haul will hold?
Thanks. 18 I believe at the moment! You're welcome. 6-7' high. Holds over 2 cords for me, maybe 2.5 with tidy center packing. It holds a lot! Every 3 minutes take a literal step back and examine your angle. Make sure to maintain that angle.
You should know me better than to think I’d put that much effort into stacking. I can appreciate the work but I ain’t doin it
Hey Brian! Nice to hear from you. Hope you are well. How’s Miss Maple? Lots of good advice already. Biggest is keep the splits stacked with a downward angle, use shims along the outside to re-establish the angle when it goes away…feels weird stacking that way but it makes the hausen self supporting and super stable and you can stack higher than you normally would. The hounds have yet to knock mine over! Just started building the second one in the middle of the back yard…so I can look at it all the time. I build mine in multiple rows to take advantage of all the space I have for it. First ring is about 6’ in diameter, it’s the hardest ring because of the small diameter. I just got done with the second ring today and placed the cedar half rounds on the outside edge to establish the downward angle for the third ring. It’ll be 12’ in diameter and 7 feet tall before the “roof” here is a pic of the first one I built And the second one now in progress.
Thanks for the advice. Doing good here, maple will be in for at least 3 cyst removals the end of the month. Hopefully they stay gone after that.
That’d be awesome Brad, but for now I think I’ll be happy if I could just get this genius to stop stealing the splits and bringing them back to the woods and burying them.I watched him on the GPS haul one split 800yards!
