i was trying to respond to Jrider's post, still getting the hang of this...shouldve done the @ with his user name as well.
Just found this thread and so responding to all the questions (I think....). My first haus's were 10' in diameter by maybe 8' tall, with one outer ring and the centers stacked end- wise (standing up on end). It actually passes a fair amount of air through it, exactly as they are supposed to do but that one was a real PITA to take down due to the inner splits interleaving with each other and locking together. Taking a split out anywhere but the outer ring often took a lot of prying, jostlying and some bad words. Now, we just throw the wood loose on the inside of the outer stacked ring. The biggest problem we have found with them is that if they are not built with enough pitch on the outer ring, the inner splits push the outer ring outward until it blows out and a section of the haus falls to the ground. The way to prevent this is a lot of angle in the outer splits; we shoot for something like 20 degrees to maybe 30 degrees, which seems like a lot when building but those never shift, never mind blowing out. And they are easy to take apart because you can dig into the side and well into the center and both edges of the circle are locked in place. We build ours on pallets, and they generally turn out about 8' in diameter (or however four pallets turn out in area) and about 6' high- this will hold two full cord of splits, with all the splits not in the outer ring just tossed in the center loose. I capped the first couple with a pointed 'hat' with the bark side of the splits facing up- that is supposed to make a 'roof' and protect the wood. In actual use, we found it made little difference, at least as far as we could determine, and it is a lot faster and easier to just finish them flat on top with no additional attention. The pile gets fairly wet either way, and snow melts off of them pretty fast, so it the peaked, bark-up cap does not really seem to do much. This is typical of what we are building now (but with more angle in the outer ring- one of these blew out this winter): There is somewhere around 12 cord of stacked wood there in a relatively small area. Brian
