One more time to visit covering or not covering wood piles; results of experiment

I think we are all friends here so Im not afraid to tell you that Im LAZY. I cut,split,and stack my wood and dont cover it all summer.Come winter time if Im motivated,which is rare, Ill cover the stacks just to keep the snow off. I never have enough wood to leave it stacked for 2 years let alone 3. I did get some punky oak like you are talking about and thought I was going to stay warm and was totally disappointed like you. Im not sure where Im going with this so Ill stop now.

 

None of that is a surprise to me.......... A long time ago I had a stack that I kept meaning to get covered and it never happened. It got punky in just over a year and a half from being uncovered. I now have stacks that are five years old and top covered and the wood is fine other than the weathering on the ends. I should mention that I stack in the woods as I have no fields so my stacks don't see much sunlight which makes it even more important for me to top cover immediately to speed up the drying process.

 

I stack in single rows, I just don't have enough material to cover all of them. I usually have the year I'm burning and next year top covered, I seem to do ok that way. I also think the single rows don't hold the moisture like multiple rows together do. I've been looking for a source for rubber roofing or old metal roofing that doesn't cost me an arm and leg. No luck so far but I'll keep looking.

 

Split birch here, if it went a couple years uncovered, would start getting punky.
If you don't split birch, it gets punky inside the water tight bark.

I stack uncovered for almost one year, Oct to August , then to the shed for 2 more.
Get it to the shed before August/Sept rainy season starts.

So yea, top covered keeping the rain & snow off the wood is much better indeed.

Climate, wood type & with or with out bark are other important factors.
Some barks rots quick & become a sponge, spruce here is like that, bark-less is better if not covered
Birch & maple are finicky, & need to be covered, they get moldy quick when wet.( sugary sap, mold likes it.) Some
sap wood will get spongy too. So wood type is a a big factor.
" Arizona type climates , top cover is optional. "

At least, top cover it in early fall the year you plan to burn it, it helps lots.

 

There is no doubt that the more moisture the wood sees the faster it will rot. The bacteria that is responsible for rot needs water to grow. so it all comes down to how much water you allow to get to that bacteria. Sometimes it's not even a mater of covered vs uncovered.
We don't have much in the way of oak or ash in these parts, but what we do have is plenty of standing dead lodgepole pine trees. In my 30+ years since I have been processing my own firewood I have noticed something very obvious in this regard, and that is that as long as these trees remain standing vertically the wood dries out very nicely, and will remain dry and well preserved for more then a decade, perhaps as much as 20 years, depending on the size of the trees, providing they remain vertical. However, if you drop one of those same trees so it is lying horizontally, still leaving the branches intact so the main trunk does not come into immediate contact with the ground, it will show signs of being rotten and punky in one years time, and in two years time will no longer be worth processing into firewood.
The reason I believe this happens is because the wood acts like a sponge, trapping and holding the water, and the bacteria, responsible for rotting the wood, needs that water to grow. In it's horizontal orientation the tree is much more exposed to the rain and snow so it has a chance to soak up a lot more moisture, and even though it dries out somewhat during the drier summer months the moment it rains or snows again it soaks up moisture again, and that feeds the bacteria again. The more rotten the wood becomes, the more spongy it becomes, and the more moisture it is able to hold, so the whole process accelerates once the moisture gets in and the rot gets a foothold. The vertical trees aren't nearly as exposed to the water and what little they get they tend to shed very easily because of their vertical orientation, so it takes the bacteria (rot) a much longer time to get that foothold. So this accounts for the huge difference in time between the horizontal trees rotting (2 years) and the vertical trees rotting (20 years).
Of course this is just my experience with lodgepole pine, not all wood is the same. Some wood, like cedar, has natural oils and stuff that repel water and inhibit bacteria growth, and some woods are more, or less, porous then others, so a lot depends on the type of wood.

 

Outstanding report, Dennis.

 

Last yr I stacked uncovered, NEVER again.

After 6 months my pine was starting to rot. It was also growing at least 4 different color molds.

Another triple stack of mixed species that was uncovered for about a year in three stacks about 6-12"s apart had a good bit of hickory in it. The hickory toward the middle stack was rotting, so bad that some pieces had no sapwood left. Beetles all in it chewing away and pinky. This was a green cut tree to not some dead decaying tree. Once moves to the shed in early summer decay stopped, coincidence, I think not.!!

 

You guys are right on the money. My experience with I uncovered oak is this. Last year some neighbors I knew divorced and asked me to take what they had left in their woodpile. Gladly, I said! The oak was still in round log form and had been exposed in piles as is, no top cover. The exterior of the logs were all pinky. The insides were in the beginning stages of rot but were still solid enough to burn.
I used the oak mixed in with other hardwoods and got decent burn times, then in the dead of winter I went full oak only to find simular results to Dennis' experiment.
I used what I had left this shoulder season. I top cover as a rule, the free stuff I told you about never had a chance, the victim of a bad marriage!

 

This is the first year I've burned more than 1 y/o css oak. I haven't top covered, but in my climate, I can see that I need to top cover. 3 year supply wood port in the works. It may be an OVERKILL but that it what we are founded on. (Shameless plug but that"s what we are founded on!)

 

White oak repels moisture, that's why it was used for boat building. Red oak absorbs moisture, that's why it's only used for interior items....

"The pores found in the growth rings on red oak are very open and porous, and should be easily identifiable. White oak, however, has its pores plugged with tyloses, which help make white oak suitable for water-tight vessels, and give it increased resistance to rot and decay. The presence of tyloses is perhaps the best and most reliable way to distinguish the two oaks"

 

Without really trying I can go 12 hours and have coals in the morning, 10 hours I have a ton of coals.
All Oak not covered that's 3 to 5 years old.
I burnt 90% Oak for about 2o years straight with no problems and seems to work just as well with the new stove.
I have had Oak inside for about 9 months and it burns the same as my outside wood as long as I make sure the surface moisture is dry before I burn it.

 

From woodheat.org, its obvious not covering your wood works very well for some people.
"Some people like to cover the drying wood pile. I do not. I’m basically a lazy guy and putting old steel roofing, plastic sheets or tarps over the pile means that I would have to chase them when the wind blew them off.

The theory behind covering the wood is that it will dry faster because rain will not soak the pieces as they dry. My experience is that the wood is dry enough by the time I want to bring it to my wood shed. Of course I may have to delay my wood shed filling if my dry wood gets rained on. I may have to wait for a few days of sun after a rain to continue stocking my shed, but it’s a great excuse to put off a chore!

If it makes you feel better to cover your wood, do it. If not, just make sure you pile it in the shed after a few days of sun"

 

Make sure we are on the same page here, wood to be used (after drying) gets covered in the fall after a dry period of 5 days or so, while its drying its not covered.

 

Back in 1978 I had a job cutting cedar shake blocks for an outfit that had dead timber rights to cut the dead and fallen cedar trees up in Northern Vancouver island. Most of the dead trees we were cutting were down already, and from the best we could tell, had been dropped during clear cut logging operations between 25 and 50 or more years previously. The logging operations back then had little accountability, and if they dropped and left a few trees that were too difficult to retrieve it was no big deal to just leave them there. By the time we got there some of the trees looked like little more then large mounds of moss and dirt on the ground and were hardly discernible as trees at all, and in some cases had little trees growing on top of them. We had flat shovels that we would scrape the built up moss and debris off the top with until we got down to the wood and we would start cutting out our rounds the best we could. It was always amazing for me to see how many cords of perfect cedar we could harvest out of trees that had been lying on the ground for possibly 50 years, completely covered and overgrown with thick moss and small plants, and in some cases even had trees growing on top of them. I remember one tree we dug out and cut into had a nest of salamanders in it and we had to stop cutting to let hundreds of these salamander scurry out to safety.
Almost all the wood we harvested had to be lifted from the spot in slings by helicopter and dropped to the closest accessible road. From there it was loaded into a truck and sent to a mill. The mill was very fussy about the length of the rounds, and had a habit of rejecting any blocks that were a bit over, or under, sized by more than an inch, and if the wood wasn't prime stuff you can be sure they would reject that too. It was obviously worth the en-devour though, because of the price of cedar at the time and the amount of wood we were able to harvest out of these huge fallen trees. If I recall correctly, the record anybody of our group ever cut out of a single tree was right around 20 cord, which is pretty darn good for an old dead that had been lying on the ground and exposed to rain forest conditions for possibly 50 years. I guess that's why it makes such great roofing shakes.

 

"some had little trees growing on top of them."
"we would scrape the built up moss and debris off the top with until we got down to the wood"

There you go
Even Mother nature "Top covers" her wood, & it last 50+ years

 

No surprise that you got faster ash accumulation when burning slightly decomposed wood. The stuff that doesn't burn also doesn't rot. You're burning more wood, so you're getting more ash.

 

BWS, just showing the other side of the issue and posting some info that corresponds with what I have found to work for me.
I am done with the back and forth crap, that's part of what got me kicked off of the old country.