Never pass it up myself. Use the hyd. to split it. If it fights the hyd. to much it goes in the campfire/uglies pile. Works great either way. I've burned up 3 pallets just this summer at camp.
Elm is one of my better firewoods here. I get oak every so often, but it has been mostly pine, tree of heaven, and sweet gum. I'm taking out the less desirable trees first and releasing the oaks and a few others. Anyway, elm is one of my better burning woods, but easily the worst to split. Last batch I cut to about 8 inches long, figuring I could load it standing up in my stove. Even at that length it was not easy to split. More than once, I'd end up nailing it to my splitting block with the wedge. But as my wife says, its my gym membership.
Interestingly over on the pelletheads forum, soft wood pellets are highly liked by a lot, they perform as well or better than the hard wood pellets.
Once it is dry, all wood performs almost identically per unit weight. One advantage that softwood pellets would have is that nasty resin that we all hate to handle when it is still wood. As pellets, it might even help hold a pellet together.
It's because they compact them enough that soft wood works well. I think all other things being equal, hardwood pellets would put off more heat than softwood ones. There's just so many variables to get an accurate figure.
Maybe jtakeman can explain, I think its higher heat with less ash? OR, I have CRS and I am talking out of my ash....
During the pelleting process softwood fiber is compressed to a similar density as the hardwood fiber. Most softwoods contain less ash content than hardwood fiber on average. A really good softwood pellet has about 0.2% ash content where as a really good hardwood pellet has around 0.4% ash content. From all the lab tests I have seen pellets with less ash content also have higher BTU ratings.
