Its good you have five acres so you can store enough wood for the three year plan. Theres no way I could store enough cords on my residential lot. I live in the sticks but still in town.
Handsonautotech , I would think that you should consider the possibility of wildfire in your stacking and storage plans more than most people around here... Don't stack near structures or under porches. Don't stack all of your wood in one place and ensure that you clear out burnable material for 50 or so feet in all directions around your wood stacks.. Ponderosa pine needles and cheat grass burn quickly and if the fire gets into a wood stack, it would be better to lose just one small stack rather than your whole supply. If you're stacking on a hill, ensure that burning embers that roll down hill, are caught by some kind of ditch before reaching your stacks.. If fire does hit your area, setting up sprinklers to wet your firewood may seem counterintuitive as you're reversing the drying process but it could be the best way to avoid losing your winter's heat.. I'm sure there are plenty of resources that talk about defensible space in the urban/wild land interface but people don't always heed good advice..
All good advice. If we get a fire here we have a foaming device on our firetruck, we coat the houses and wood stacks with a foam that protects them from burning. It will be a lot easier for the truck to cover one large stack with the foam instead of multiples. The stacks are far enough away from the house per fire mitigaton rules up here. I am behind on my fire mitigation, trees are supposed to be between 10 and 20 feet from each other and we have a cluster I need to fell on the south side of my house as well as behind it. I also have another 70 foot tree on the north side of my house that has to go, I am just getting as much felling experience as I can before I try and tackle it. Loosing all of my wood piles is somethjng I thought about that would really suck in a forrest fire, but if I am going to be in a situation to lose one I am sure it would take them all no matter how far apart they are, If the fire is in the meadows hitting structures I would lose everything on all 5 of my acres. I can only hope the foam would do it's job. I wish everyone was as knowledgeable as you about fire hazards up here. Most of our forrest fires are started by out of state campers. Last time we had a fire threatening the meadows they foamed 90 houses and did a controlled burn on the hill against the fire line. It did save the fire from jumping down, but with no trees on the hill the floods a few years later created a mud slide that destroyed 2 homes and left one with a basement full of mud. Talk about being stuckinthemuck
Oh yeah. Forgot you were a fire fighter. You obviously have a lot more knowledge of the issues than your average front range dweller or visitor. In 1994, I watched a giant smoke cloud rise from CSU's Pingree Park campus in the hills after they failed to enact the same mitigation measures that they preached. Looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off from 25 miles away. Yeah. Basement full of mud would suck. Better than losing everything I suppose but certainly not a desired consolation prize.
Sean the problem is it is not a flat 5 acres, so the flat areas are at a premium. If you see some of the photos of my stacks I built sort of a hausholden and I am "leaning" piles against it up the hill. Pretty soon that will be full and I may try another one further back from that. The other option I have is storing 200 feet down the drive way in another flat area, but not sure I want to be moving the wood twice that far to get it in the house, I may not have an option though.
