So with the new house we bought, there was a cord of wood outside under some trees near the house in a spot that doesn’t get much air flow. It looked like it has been there for a while and the wood had checks on them which makes me think they are well seasoned, but there is also a little fungus and mud that splashed on the pile from rain coming off the metal roof (no rain gutters). I couldn’t figure out if the wood was well seasoned or still wet so I bought a wood moisture meter to find out. The problem is that the moisture meter has 4 different settings you can use depending on the type of wood, and I don’t know what kind of wood I have. When I tested it on the same piece of wood with all 4 settings, there was a difference of 10% on setting A vs setting C. Do you guys know what the difference would be for each setting? I assume it’s the density of the wood (soft vs hard wood) but in the list for each setting the description is very basic. Like it just says for Cherry use setting “C”but if I look at a wood hardness chart online, North American cherry is rated at 950 (soft) and Bolivian cherry is 3190 (hard) anyone have any thoughts or input?
I'd go with C. Just like multiple guess questions back in school Otherwise maybe test a known seasoned split and adjust your setting until it makes sense and stick with it! Orrrrr match it up with someone elses known meter on the same split. Couple of ideas.
Hahaha Setting C gave me the highest reading so I think I’ll go with that and aim for 20% so I know it’s either 20% or lower. I also assume the wood is mostly maple so C made sense
I'd say go with setting "C" as well. I mean, that is unless you know you have kokrodua, afromrosia, or bidinkula.
I think i have the same one and use C most of the time. If im not sure ill use all 4 and kinda average it out. I process only hardwoods.
A is for ash, apple, alder, aspen B is for beech C is for cottonwood, cedar D is for dogwood You need their high-end model for others. JUST KIDDING! !! The manual doesn't say which setting to use?
I posted the picture of the manual in my first post. The problem is how broad the definition of the wood is in the manual. Maybe I’m just being too picky ♂️
It does. But as I pointed out, most of the species are definitely not your North American tree species. My new one has 10 different settings, and a lot of the species mentioned are super foreign. So I went off the 1-10, 10 being the most dense wood and go from there depending on what wood I'm checking MC on. I also verified readings based off of my other MM. It's accurate, and super handy.
It's understandable why you'd question that. Teak is super dense. That's on "A", but so is walnut. Well, the Walnut we know here is only a 16 mbtu a cord wood, so it's not dense at all. "B" is white poplar and some foreign tree. Well, poplar here in NA is on par BTU and density with the tree species on setting "D", which are softwoods. Setting "c" is ash and elm. Ok, a good mid grade ~20 our so mbtu a cord wood. It just makes little sense on the a through d scale. That's all. I say since you tried all settings, and c is the most pessimistic, go with that. Now you could double check it with a different meter, or try a burn test too.
Yeah I think I’ll stick with mostly C/D for hardwoods and A/B for softwoods. I was just surprised at how much a difference there was between settings. I was under the impression that most wood moisture meters don’t even have settings like that. If there was only one setting, how would it accurately measure the wood if it didn’t know if it was a softwood or hardwood?
I had that same one. Gave it to a fellow wood burner at work. C was consistently the setting that always matched my other meter. I have since gotten another meter which is the same brand as my first meter (different brand than the one I gifted), and it too had C as the most consistent reading compared to my first meter. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Easy answer. It wouldn't. In order to be accurate, they need settings depending on the density of the wood. They possibly could self calibrate for different wood density, but on a cheap one, I doubt it. The Ryobi phoneworx is probably the exception at $25, because it uses your phone as a display. So it's got all sorts of wood settings.
