Just wondering about pellet usage to cord wood. Selling my lopi agp to hopefully order my WS Ideal Steel soon.do you think it is somewhat comparable to a cord of wood to a pallet of pellets? I am heating a crazy good insulated 2500 sq foot two story home. This year I only went through just over two ton of pellets. I’ve got 3-1/2 cord ready to go for this coming fall under cover. Do you think that is enough? Thank you for any help!
Always shoot to have 2-3 years worth of wood in the stacks. Lots of reasons. Our pnw wood is less energy dense than most forum members since they’re burning good stuff like oak. Our burn season is much longer too. You might only need 4 cords each year so put up 8 and replace what you used next summer.
Hello! Welcome from Bremerton! Since your house is well insulated, you’re likely going to want to have those cords you have and add a few more for back up. Not all of your wood will be pristine but it will be better to be prepared than to be deep in March and possibly April now next year and asking for wood. Pound for pound we all get the same energy out of wood BTU’s but some burn better than others. Cottonwoods, cedar and Alders burn best in Sept/Oct March,April leave the heavies like fir, madrona, oak, and fruitwood ones for Nov-Feb. but each year is different so plan accordingly. What is the wood you have now? Woodstock is going to carry you well so that will help immensely. Many of the wood ads I’m seeing usually for free wood in WA are beginning to dwindle, since people are staying home, they aren’t doing many of those tree cuttings or they are getting picked up surprisingly fast. I have a wide range of everything including oak and fruitwoods. So to say we don’t have good wood would be false but our wood isn’t as grain tight as our Easterly set members. Our wood however season’s incredibly quickly though. Alder and Fir are just very safe options and to get ahead on this quick is to try and get logs or cut down trees on the property you own. Cut it now and your wood should be ok as long as you burn your driest source first and work your way down. Also at least double your amount you have currently splitting and stack under cover. Split it smaller as well and stack it in the most sun-baked windy spot of your property. Good luck and Welcome to FHC, you’re in the right place.
I really appreciate the reply. I have pretty much all alder for this year and some maple along with some amazing old fir beams which are very dry. I have 31/2 cord split stack and under new wood shed up on pallets which get great wind and sun. I have thought about buying a ton of the Idaho presto logs to get me started this year. I have started filling my other spots in woodshed up and have all alder log length ready for me to split soon for next few burning seasons.
Welcome. Per the BTU chart in the resources tab, Alder weighs 2,380 pounds per cord. So it sounds like you may be set for next season for similar results as you had with the pellets. I'm no expert on that comparison, but pound to pound this should give you a starting point for comparison. Does a pellet bag state how many BTU per bag / lb. or some type of info? As mentioned by others, most of us here try to get a couple, few, several, and WOW heating seasons ahead on dry wood. Dry wood is key in a nice efficient modern wood stove. Dennis explains it well in his Primer on Woodburning by Backwoods Savage Lots of good info in the resources section. Hope you enjoy the info / pix sharing that the great members here all love discussing and sharing. Awesome crew here. The founding members put together a great place!
My shed holds 11 cords too, probably for the same reason of staying under the 200 sf building permit rule. I burn half of that per year in my 1700 sf house up near Buckley including .5 to 1 cord in the shop. So it’s a 2 year shed. Full time wood heat, no furnace. Here’s the log load I had delivered 2 days ago to restock the shed. I want a full 11 cord shed going in to summer so that the softwoods get 2 summers of drying before burning. These cat stoves have no problem with our relatively low density fuel woods of the pnw. Common local firewood species are fir, maple, alder and they’re all great.
This is an interesting question. I don’t buy the pellets but I see them at Wilco or TSC, and local grocery stores. The average bag is 40lbs correct? Some are smaller but depends on what it is since some stores will carry both heating and smoking pellets and the costs can be a varied amount but here in WA state it’s usually Douglas fir pellets as the general heating pellets. These bags are at the right store between $4-5. I look over and the bundle of wood that everyone has wood guilt if they buy it (at least probably from this site they do!) was above $5 and I’ve seen it as high as 7-9. We’re talking about some of this crap pine stuff too. If it were me I’d be taking the bag because knowing even the pellets are smaller, that wood bundle isn’t much more than 8-10Lbs and doug fir has a much better BTU rating. At 2970 lbs a cord dry depending on the moisture %...20.7 million BTU’s in a cord, it weighs more than Alder only by a little bit and Alder lags only a bit behind at about 17.5 m BTU’s. They aren’t bad at all here. Rounding things up, the BTU’s for the bag of pellets of DF is about 280K of BTU’s, the bundle of wood would be exhausted before it was given a chance to turn on the fans of my insert.
Highbeam , If you are considered about over heat would you stick to more Alder? My pellet stove about 80% of the time is on low.
Twigster Nice looking shed. You can have your wood top covered and off the ground and still have good air flow thru it and it is in the sun. Can't beat that with a stick. Did you build the shed?
Wow Nice beams you cut there Twigster! Those are some great overnighters there. The grain must be amazing up close. I love square wood. Anything from dunnage to large skid/pallets. The wood burns so long I’ve been convinced it comes from the East.
And then some, if you get a close up I’d love to see that. Seeing old growth cedar and fir grain is becoming a true thing of the past. If I find it it’s in blocks and often quite small.
Don’t worry so much about species. It’s all the same btu per lb. I’ve burned a lot of alder and even though it’s slightly lower energy per cord than fir it makes ash. Doug fir makes almost zero ash. The ash is really good at slowing down the burn so less heat blows up the stack. Honestly, I would prefer a shed full of alder or maple but loggers cut fir mostly so I end up with fir. You’ll see that your cat stove is able to burn most anything well. A lot of the old wives tales about different woods just don’t matter. Get it dry and it will burn nicely. Even, gasp, cottonwood or pine. Fill your shed. Just do it. You’ll have plenty for this winter and then next summer just replace what you used. Your wood is drier and you don’t need to worry about running out.
Welcome Twigster. I live in southern Maine, so completely different climate however, we did just switch back to wood after about a decade of running two pellet stoves. I now run just the Fireview downstairs, keeping it around 80 most of the time vs 72 with pellets. Upstairs runs 6-10 degrees cooler depending on outside conditions. If it gets into single digits we turn on the heat pump that’s right above where the second pellet stove was previously. We burned 4 1/2-5 tons of pellets with an occasional 5 1/2 over that time. Last winter we burned slightly over 5 cord of wood and this year it’s less than 4 and we’re not quite done yet. I have about 3 weeks left at the current rate and the long range forecast looks like we’ll use it. So in our case, I’d say that we burn almost exactly the same amount ton vs cord. The wood is more efficient and effective in our opinion though, keeping the house much warmer even when the power goes out, for less money if we have to purchase firewood locally. Green wood is at least $50 less than pellets per cord. Different circumstances but I hope this helps! Oh yeah, electric bill dropped considerably as well, another bonus!
Highbeam I almost have second bay loaded after today. I have alder logs laying in driveway that might get cut and split this weekend. This will fill my third bay and then some. It will be easier next year just worrying about filling one bay.
