SO: Shrink wrap with only weep holes for the winter, come Spring poke some holes in the shrink wrap. After about a month remove the wire frame from the pallet and cut a hole/holes in the bottom for your young plants, place the ventilated "greenhouse" over your plants, and get your tender plants out (or at least some of them to give you an early crop) a month or so early. I've done this with perforated plastic bags over tomatoes, but if I get around to it this year, may try with beans and cukes and celery as well. Just enough plants to add to the spinach and lettuce and peas for an early salad...... I have an unused child's swing made of heavy metal with a very large stable base, in an inverted V shape. This puts me in mind to make a door for one side with PVC pipe attached to the top crosspiece, and shrink wrap the whole thing, with a shrink wrapped door. Would make a large almost free cold frame/greenhouse for my plants before they are ready to be planted out, and would save me a lot of time and effort involved in moving them in and out of the house for a week or two. Our temps are variable enough that I can't always leave them outside overnight when acclimatizing them. This would allow me to get them out much earlier. I've used the frame for growing peas before, but never thought of using it as a greenhouse/cold frame. This site is great. If this works well, next year I may get a large deep plastic trough to put in there, and attempt a hothouse, with a foot of raw horse manure in the bottom, then some compost, then some soil, and try to start early crops while we still have snow.....I could wrap the trough with insulation to keep the heat in.....or construct a frame for it and rigid insulate that.... I'm always looking for ways to improve my totally organic gardening, without going to much expense. I grow all my vegetables for a lot of labor and about $100 a year for seed and starter mix (peat and vermiculite). Sorry...getting off topic. But I can see uses for these "kilns" when not drying wood in them. And with their size I think they are likely quite portable.
I thought the same thing with our swingset. I got out voted by the kids though. Apparently swinging is more fun than watching plants grow or firewood dry.
My youngest kid is 34, and my grandchildren (a) are in HI and (b) are too big for this swingset. But I agree, I totally would have lost the argument back when..... Have to say, this was (is) a well built swingset. Like new, except the poly rope for the swing has long since bit the dust..... Community Playthings.
What I was thinking is that there is such a mass of wood, the inside/inner stacks would be less pron to the solar gain? The outside of the stacks would seem to be likely to dry the best. Just as if they were unwrapped, no? Be interesting to see if the middle of the inner stacks was the same temp as the outer stacks. Do you have a temperature probe that could reach down there?
The whole stack is completely enclosed in heavy plastic....i used the shrink wrap to seal everything shut to keep as much heat as possible...kinda like a greenhouse.... the only openings are the slits i cut in the base of the plastic...i would hope that it warms as a mass...kinda like when you leave a wet shirt in your car on a hot day with the winders up....
Split, I picked up eight 40" X 48" pallets this week in anticipation of trying this drying process. I too am anticipating a shorter drying time for firewood and look forward to trying the solar kiln. At the very least, it should make the yard look just a bit neater! I would think that the whole mass of wood heats up and retains it's heat longer, but on the downside, takes longer to heat up also. That's why I choose the pallet size I have.
Having it wrapped tight like that with only weep holes is going to raise the humidity also, so no air movement and high humidity to boot, I think there is room for improvement.
It will be interesting to see how your big cube does compared to my small cubes. Do you have any initial moisture readings? ( mine are 34% for the Mulberry) How much sun does the spot get? Any idea how many plastic " layers " you have?
No readings other than "green"...its got a layer of plastic..and a layer of shrinkwrap to hold it all together...it will get decent sun during the day..
I've go a nice sunny spot for some green White Ash I just cut and split and plan on tracking its drying this summer for fun, will be interesting. I was not trying to be a smart ash, just pointing out that it would be good to lower the humidity and get more air flow for the best results.
The full wrap might be detrimental to drying times during the early stage of drying. The RH will be elevated, and you will be limited by the rate at which you can condense the moisture out. But once you get down to the latter stages, like the last 10 points of moisture, the elevated heat level will drastically accelerate the water movement and there is far less moisture being evaporated so the RH issue isn't as pronounced. With traditional drying of wood like oak those last 10 points can take 2 years. Speeding up the latter stages is probably where this method excels.
"Traditional" drying means different things to different people as has been discussed many times before, after reading a lot of articles on drying firewood and lumber its obvious that some people don't do all they can to dry their wood as fast as possible which in many cases they do not need to. My Oak is dry in two years.
Just seems like there needs to be a better moister escape to me also.... You folks sure do go through a lot of trouble drying wood....! I split it, stack it, and put it in the shed when it's dry. Some wood takes 1 season, some takes a full year, some takes 3 years. I don't cover it, I don't talk to it, nothing. Just let it dry. It gets snowed on, it get rained on, it gets un on it, it gets wind on it. Sometimes I notice it's driest right after it rains (a day later). It's like the moister from the rain wicks up the internal moister and it comes out and dries quick in the sun. Get ahead a couple years, and you don't have to worry about all this work... That said, I'm going to try and cover some of my stacks this summer....
