Found standing dead aspen trees, questioning usability for emergency firewood

Wow you must be fun at parties

 

Haha. Just learned from my hunny, she takes BP meds and aspirin, gets cold, wants a fire. I build it, her personal summer (hot flashes) come by, burning up, turn on A/C... nope open window or go outside...lol

 

LOL yeah i hear ya, my philosophy is that if i'm gonna burn wood the heat is gonna stay inside, a tad longer than if i had opened the windows. Bedroom door is always closed so it's nice and cool in there. Come real winter with temperature in the -30F range i doubt this will ever be an issue!

 

Hope y'all have a good winter with plenty of wood. Glad it doesn't get that cold here...

 

Coldest i've seen was -43f. The weather lady was basically telling people to stay inside at all costs. She has huge lips, bet she can keep a man warm.

 

Lips, hips or both...

 

Both

 

The only way to know if a new score is test our not it's too use a moisture meter. That will tell you if it's burnable or not.

Yes, dead standing trees can can get you though times, but the bottom free feet will usually be too wet.

I've found that dead standing barkless elm trees are burnable the same day after splitting at least after 6 feet up or so. The bottom few feet will be good for next season.

 

You might be ok with some of that, just knowing you don’t have prime wood as far as dry stuff goes, cautions have been given. If you decide to, dry the wood around your stove a bit before you get it put in there. Punk is not your friend but sometimes it helps seeing how much of your splits are made up of it. Then you decide if it’s feasible or not to put in the stove. Split small.

 

I've burnt similar dead standing Aspen, but after letting it dry for a while (I think a couple of months). It did better than I thought it would, we did not freeze that winter.

I am not a fan of indoor drying, though it is commonly suggested. That adds tons of moisture to the house, at a huge heat loss (it is exactly like running a swamp cooler in the house). If I am going to use stove heat to boil off water, it will be insde the stove rather than inside the house.

 

That’s strange. Most woodstove users search for ways to add humidity to the home during the winter. Warm air furnaces come with humidifiers installed.
If you have a one piece stainless chimney you can stuff as much humidity up it as you want. Of course burning water is a good way to decrease the temps in your house. With a masonry chimney stuffing moisture up the chimney heightens the possibility you burn the house to the ground.

 

Google Image Result for https://media2.giphy.com/media/xTiTnxqtQsFbhrfGZW/source.gif

 

Yeah i've had big humidity issues in here, i will be very selective of what i bring inside now!

 

Well, a MM tells MC, but doesn't show you how it burns. A MM is super quick to use though and will pretty much say that it will burn, or not.

 

As Backwoods Savage stated i was going to suggest the same. Try and burn some now. CSS and cover the "best" of the wood if in a pinch? I have no experience with aspen. If im not mistaken its rather soft from the get go so once decay starts it only gets worse.
If its wood it will burn and throw heat! DRY wood is key.

 

Prior to joining this forum (thank you guys for the invaluable knowledge, love it) i was burning green wood in here. Took forever to light and i didn't realize how little heat it produced ... until i lit dry wood yesterday night. It was 82f in here, i wanted to die haha.

 

Well don’t do that LOL
So what kind of stove are you using? Is it controllable? I don’t think I’ve ever had my house at 82. I’d melt.

 

No temp control, just some old school damper i installed and my gut feeling ... which was highly tarnished by all this green wood burning action. Now i know, dry wood is that much more potent and i also know the scientific reason behind it. I'm the type of person to read about quantum physics on a friday night so you can imagine my delight in learning about this stuff!

 

Gotta stay on top of it if your wood is not ideal and forms creosote, that is for sure. But that is in the chimney, where you can deal with it. Moisture wetting all the cold spots in the house, mostly where it cannot be seen, is harder to deal with.

The best cure for dryness with a wood stove is installing an outside air kit. The dryness is caused by dry outside air entering the house in order to supply the needs of the stove. If you can route that air directly to the stove, it will not dry the house any worse than any other source of heat.