ChipDrop myth busted

Well after 3 years with an online Chip Drop request, I finally got a delivery. I live 25 miles south east of Boston towards Cape Cod. The tree company was from Cambridge (essentially Boston). Driver didn’t speak a lot of English but he said it was Oak, which it definitely isn’t. Splits easy and I’m ripping through it with an X25.

My guess is this is Maple. But I’m not certain of that. What say you?

 

Norway maple, a common street/ornamental landscape tree.

 

X2 on Norway maple. Dries in a year, decent btu's and yes its does hand split easily.

Good things come to those who wait.

 

This makes more sense of why this tree company came from the city to the burbs.

 

One thing I did new recently with my request was to agree to pay the arborist's Chip Drop Fee. Within 2 weeks of making that request, I had a drop. And I only paid $20 for this load.

 

Thats a really nice load.

Lots of Norway encounter is laden with knots and I i'll only take the nicer stuff. It's a prize when I get nice straight logs usually from trees that seeded themselves on property lines and grow unchecked.

How do you normally acquire your firewood?

 

We have about a 2 acre lot that abuts probably like 15 acres of woods that contains mostly red oak, white oak, yellow pine, very few ash. We've had a number of Nor'Easter storms blow through here over the last 10 years which have almost always broke oak trees in the neighborhood which I've then processed. I've really made out on wood in recent years by just talking to tree companies working in our neighborhood. This has resulted in 3 free drops over the last few years - mostly oak.

 

Bingo. Norway maple.

It's good firewood. Dries quickly, more BTU's than red and soft maples, not quite as high of BTU as sugar maple though.

 

Norway maple is one of the fastest to dry. A while back I weighed some splits to see how fast they were drying. I had a piece of Norway on top of a stack, getting full benefit of the sun. It stopped losing weight after 50 sunny spring/summer days.

I live in the suburbs also. I get my wood from tree services also. I have a couple of guys that drop wood off when I ask. Obtaining wood is absurdly easy.

 

I tend to compare it with ash in terms of btu's and drying time. What is your experience/opinion?

 

Do you do a test like this for all species?

 

I concur. It's much like ash, burning wise as well as drying time. 1 summer split and stacked and it's good.

 

Norway is very common around here, but I dont score it often enough. Always a prize when i score a nice straight one.

 

No, I was mostly watching the rate at which various species lost water and the impact of rain. Most often I’ll weigh as they are split, then when I stack and then I check the when I burn them. The Norway happened to be close to the same weight on the day that I stacked and then when I burned it a year or three later.

 

Congrats, that looks like some real good wood. We don't have that tree. Cool that you got a call.

 

Most of my wood contacts are too far away to drop it off, so I have to go get it. Still not a bad deal.

 

And based on you pics you get some serious loads of wood.

 

I don’t like to come home empty.