Do you know if you cut only standing dead trees or were they living, green trees? Was it a fireplace, wood heater or what was it? Oak is super wet upon cutting live trees.
As a kid, I remember loading up the Fisher stove up with hedge and often see the sap bubbling from the ends of the rounds afterwards. Quite often, I also remember the stove pipe being cherry red. I can't remember a single time Dad cleaned the chimney. I guess we were lucky.
welcome to the forum figor. Can you send me a cord of hedge so I can validate these experiments myself LOL
I don’t recall the oak. We didn’t get as much of it as we did hedge. We lived in central Illinois and about the only trees around were in hedge rows around the fields. The hedge apple was definitely live. Dad knew a few farmers that were more then happy to let him cut out of their hedge rows as they didn’t like them shading their crops. He cut them down and sawed them and I split them and loaded them. The role never changed the whole time I lived at home. I enjoyed it as a boy but not so much as a teenager. Gave me a strong back though. We had a furnace add on stove. I can’t recall the name of it. It wasn’t a Clayton or anything like that. It was kind of short and was plumbed into the furnace plenum. It had a bi-metallic vent on the door. I remember being fascinated at how the copper coil adjusted the vent. I also like filling it up because when I’d open the door that hedge would shoot embers everywhere. It was about like fireworks.
I grew up burning wet wood, and we burned a lot of it. Many a nice timber tree got turned into firewood. I remember a couple of years when dad burned 20 or 30 cord of wood, throwing sopping wet hardwood into an outdoor boiler that didn't even have a lined firebox or a baffle. I burned wet wood too, for a few years until we were able to get better at scrounging and managed to get ahead. Now I don't have room for all of it.
My wife and I moved back to NorCal and bought our first house in late summer of 2000. This was in the mountains, about 4500' elevation. It snowed in September and the last snow was in June. The central heat was broken and we didn't have money to replace it. Our main source of heat was an old wood stove. I learned all about burning wet wood that winter. All the wood for sale was far from ready to burn. I supplemented what seasoned and dry wood I could buy with standing dead oak that was closer to being ready to burn than anything else. This is when I learned what you all call the three year plan. We burned 7 cords in that leaky old wood stove that year, but I still managed to cut split and stack an additional three cords for the next year. We bought a new Quadrafire stove the following summer and the following year we burned less than 3 cords. I don't understand after going through that year anyone could continue to burn wet wood.
The problem is "you don't know what you don't know". If someone ever tried burning with dry wood, they'd never go back.
Do you mind saying what part of N CA that was? If it's 'only' 4500 ft elevation and snows Sep and the last snow is in June, I wanna know where it is! Sounds interesting!
There have been a couple times when due to extenuating circumstances, I had to burn wet or green wood. The last time was 20 years ago. I have about a 4 year supply now and growing. Burning wet/green wood is in the same league as going hungry in my book. Not fun.
I cut a live white oak this summer. 14" DBH. About 6" in I was getting soaked, gas was just pouring out of this tree, running down the stump in streams enough to move sawdust powder with it. Then wondering what kind of catastrophic saw failure would dump that much gas onto the bar to get it in a tree, and holy crapola one spark and it's going to be interesting, to realizing that was all water . . . .
It was above Pollock Pines off of US50. That was an unusual year for sure but taught me a lot the hard way!
Any left over wood with a MM reading or 200 readings would really be hard to argue proof of wood that truly isn't dry enough.
Except a face cord is 1/3 of a cord and a cord is 128 cubic feet. A Rick is a lot more arbitrary and less defined.
I have cut a few trees that poured water. One of them ran for a full 5 minutes while I ate a sandwich. I never did find the cavity that held all that water, just a little ring shake and a small hollow center.
The problem with that is it only works when the wood is 16" long....anything else and you are not buying 1/3 cord.
