On the subject of how much water is contained within that plastic. Air at 100% humidity and at 140 degrees can hold .131 liters 0f water per cubic meter or so the online calculator tells me. (yes air pressure comes into play but I'm assuming it is constant). A meter is roughly a yard, a pallet is 40x48 inches, so I'm going to wing it and say that a 1/4 cord, stacked and wrapped on a pallet will have about a cubic meter of air space, therefore with the air fully saturated at 140 degrees it'll only be holding .131 liters or about 1/2 cup of water in a gas form. 1/4 cord of green, fresh off the stump oak is going need to lose at least 40 gallons of water or 1280 half cups. So as this works there needs to be a lot of water condensing on the plastic and running out the weep holes. It would be interesting to put a tub under one of these and see just how much water is dripping out.
I'm suddenly having visions of a hillbilly solar still. A by-product of drying firewood: drinking water. It's a California thing.
If that was my situation, as soon as I could I would build a mini-greenhouse out of salvaged aluminum frame sliding storm windows, to avoid using more plastic. The production and use of plastics dumps a buttload of toxins into the environment and into us. We've each got several pounds of plastics-related chlorine-based compounds in our bodies....carcinogens, immune system and nervous system destroyers, and so on. I'm not pointing a finger....I'm assaulting the hell out of the planet, no question. But I'll try to minimize my impact, if I remember and if it's not too much work. I have a canvas bag in the car that I take into stores, to avoid adding more bags to the islands of plastic floating in the oceans. We use 100 billion plastic bags a year in this idiot country. Just sayin'. But yeah, I would wrap it if I was in a tight spot for dry wood, but find something else asap. Luckily, I was able to scrounge enough dead stuff out of my woods to make do until my stacks dried. Definitely. If you have some way to bring out wood, you can find a ton of dry stuff out there. Small standing trees with the bark fallen off will generally be ready to burn, especially after sitting under a cover this summer. My BIL was totally out of wood. We scrounged behind his house and pulled out almost a cord of wood in a couple of days; Dead Red Elm, Dogwood, Redbud, Mulberry and Cherry "cores" (lying on the ground with all the sapwood rotted away, but rot-resistant heart in great shape.) Go get it, man!
I set up a temp probe/RH monitor for my little experiment today. Nice graphs and everything. I 'borrowed' the probe from work. It makes really slick daily/weekly/monthy graphs. (MRTG anybody?) The kiln probe is installed on the 'ridge pole'. I think I might want to move it lower so I can see what is going on where the wood is. The wood within is Ailanthus (argh). I had a huge one in my back yard next to my shed that I had taken down last week. All but the bottom 20 feet got chipped. (Maybe 65', it was above the tops of my oaks so it had to go). So it was what was available. Although my tree guy doesn't know it, he is happy he didn't chip it all. There was metal in it. So far the wood stacked next to it is drying vastly faster. I weighed some when I had it open today. It will be interesting to see if the kiln can catch up. I thought the RH was a bit off. It is far less than what I expected to see. But its climb correlated almost perfectly to the afternoon temp drop using a dew point calculator. It'll be interesting to see how high it gets tomorrow afternoon after being sealed for a day. Kiln RH Inside Temp Inside Ambient outside under my deck.
More like pine and fir flavored. I see where you ate going though. If companies can make tons of $ on regular water, tree flavored and "enriched" wood water has to be even better.
No pics yet but I wrapped just under a half cord of fresh cut poplar today. Moisture was in the 40% and up range. I know poplar dries fast any way just curious to see how it works.
Paul bunion On the subject of heat influencing removal of water from wood... I was burning brush and splitter leftovers tonite, and I thought, "I've seen some pizzing outta the end of questionable MC wood in the stove, so what if I..." throw a branch from the white oak scrounge from a few weeks ago, into the burn barrel? After about 1.5 minutes, here come the bubbles and the hiss of pizzing wet white oak.... Except for a little updraft from the barrel half sitting on some bricks(it has no bottom, propped up for air flow) should one assume that Heat, and Heat only, is causing the bubbling pizz action? I would say.... yep. Not trying to stir the pot, but if the heat of the fire can produce such near immediate results, than surely plastic wrapped, sun powered "kilns" must be emulating the intense heat of this burn barrel situation. BTW, that's the pecan packed solar kiln in the background. Stuffed and wrapped in January, almost no condensation on the inside of the plastic....
