Although I’ve built holzhausen in the past I decided to give something a little different a try today. It’s a basic two row pallet stack with hauzenesque ends instead of cribbed. While the result doesn’t look quite as neat as cribbed ends it feels sturdier than 2 independent cribbed end stacks.
I've been debating on building a HH for the last few years and since I have around 3 cords of red oak (about half was CSS last December), I think I may try one next month (since the splits will have to dry for three years anyway and I stack oak separate from everything else). I was wondering why there is no cord calculator for HH's under the FHC resource section. The formula I'm going off of is Height x Pi x Radius squared (volume of a cylinder) which for a 10-foot high HH would be around six cords (10 x 3.1415 x 25 = 785 cu. ft. of wood/128 (cu. ft. per cord) = 6.13). I'll be doing a roughly 8' base and will not know the height until it is done. Haven't built one yet but have read countless posts on here for advice/tips. No access to plastic pallets but I will be using the heavier-duty blue or red ones.
If you are building an 8' base that means your radius is 4'. Your formula should be 10' x 3.1415 x 16 not 25 which makes it under 4 cord at that height. I would suggest doing it shorter than 10' because you'll need to get up on a ladder to fill it and that makes it super inefficient and more dangerous and more annoying to take splits off of. It also makes it harder to keep stable. I keep mine at 6' and that's plenty high where I can still reach over. Plus if you want to cover it it will be a bear to do it at 10'. Keep that downward angle until you are ready to finish the top. Then you can flatten it out or even tilt it slightly up to create a slope for the water to shed off. Leave some space in between the pallets to maximize the radius. That will also create air channels to help with drying.
I realize that for an eight-foot base the calculation would be using 16, not 25. The 25 was just an example for a 10-foot high HH with a 10' base to show the formula I am using (I should have annotated the base size for the example in the original post). I don't plan on going 10' high with an eight-foot base on wooden pallets. I won't know the height until I start building and see how long the oak lasts but like your stacks, around six foot would be ideal. Yeah, covering a 10-foot high HH would be a pain, especially with our winds. Right now I don't plan on covering it until about six months before it goes in the wood shed and will just use the bark-up system for the last few layers at the top until then.
Yes, the formula is radius^square X pi, all units in feet. So the radius in feet times (3.14 times radius squared). This will yield the volume of the halz hausen. The real problem with accuracy kicks in when figuring out how many sq. feet in a cord. A close packed, stacked cord is considered to be 128 sq. ft.. But the centers of the hauzens I build are loose pack (thrown inside the outer ring) and this is generally taken as 180 cu. ft. per cord. So....... what I do is take a mix of the two and use about 160 cu. ft. to a cord in a holz hauzen. It is at best a close approximation and at worse a bad guess using math to give seemingly worthiness. On another level, a 'cord' of relatively dry (20% max. water content) oak weighs around 4K lbs. The same cord will weight 5K to 5.5K lbs. when green. But we measure our firewood by volume, which is really too bad because it really is a poor way to put a metric on firewood. The good news is that some of us find holz hauzens to be interesting, attractive (and can be beautiful if made with care), free- standing and a very efficient way to stack firewood. It is the only way I know of to stack firewood basically wherever in a person's yard that both passersby and the neighbors find attractive and not offensive in the least. Best of luck with yours and by all means, have fun building them, looking at them and then breaking them down (also very easy, still attritive and very safe, even taken half- way down). My own motto is that if I cannot have three chuckles a day I ain't gettin' outta' bed, and a hausen usually provides one. BTW- when you break them down, I think you will be amazed at the critters who have made a home in it (them), especially over the winter. Interesting to see all the nests, reptile skins and so forth.
