If I can catch a neighbor home a few houses down I will ask her about taking a dead, standing elm in her yard. It's real tall, a mature tree, and the bark is just hanging off in sheets. Makes me curious how it would split/season/compare to this that came from a living tree but left to lay as a log on the ground for a year until the bark is falling off.
My understanding is moisture meters are unreliable above 30% moisture because somewhere above 30% "free moisture" is present and moisture meters are not designed to measure "free moisture" wood. Moisture meters measure the resistance of damp cellulose not unbound water in the wood tubes. I treat any wood testing over 30 percent as simply wet wood.
My guess is it will be similar splitting. The higher up the tree you go the drier it will be and thus split easier. If you are splitting it with hydraulics the bigger rounds from nearer the base will probably ooze some water around the wedge but it will still split pretty decently and not be a complete stringy mess like if the tree was taken alive. Let the big rounds from down low sit for several months until the ends start checking and then it’ll split good, but still need at least 6 months before it is stove ready. All the above is based on my experience, YMMV! I deal with lots of elm
I see some “stringyness” in those splits. Don’t know your exact drying conditions, but I was in Louisiana once back in my teens and not sure I’ve dried out yet from that trip. If those were recently split, I’d give em a year I’m my environment.
I think perhaps they went by cutting and splitting when green. Do that and it shreds rather than splits and therefore it burns faster so you enjoy the heat only for a short time. This is why we don't even cut elm until it is dead and the bark is off. We even leave much of it unsplit then and it burns very good with lots of heat. I even burned some during this cold spell.
Here is some elm I cut several years ago. It had been dead a few years before I got to it and even the bottom of that tree was quite dry. As for splitting, I did split a few by hand just to show someone how easy it split but I can no longer split much by hand. I did also make a video when I was splitting using hydraulics and have posted that video here a few times. I think The Wood Wolverine really liked it.
