I took some advice from my previous post and ask around sawmills to see if they have any scrap wood they can give away. One guy was very nice and gave me some old lumbers . He said they should be fine for burning and they are not pressure/chemical treated. A few of them having darker resins that I suspected of chemical treatment. I’d like to make sure and get your opinion on them. I appreciate your feedbacks! View attachment 185305
The first pic the wood focused on looks like hemlock to me. It can have pronounced stripes like that. I'd be more worried about the landscape timber in the second pic. ACQ and Copper Azole can be a tannish brown. I have had some ACQ from Home Depot that had almost a worthless amount of treatment as they rotted in three years. There's conflicting opinions regarding burning ACQ and Copper Azole and the same for gardening with it. It took many years to ban Chroamte Copper Arsenate from home construction/use which looks green. You shouldn't burn that. If the sawmill was just cutting timber then the likelyhood should be fairly slim. if they are also a lumberyard importing from beyond their own sawmill then all bets are off.
I agree completely will bill here. Only thing that looks treated to me is possibly the landscape timber shaped piece in the second pic. That one would probably be safer for stacking on than sticking in the stove.
Thanks for replying . I won’t burn the landscape timber. Here how they look in my suv trunk. Can you spot anything else other than landscape timber? The guy said the wood is reclaimed wood. Some used in old buildings.
Looks like landscape timber by shape doesn't mean it is or has been treated. why take a chance. By the same token it's not like you're gonna blow up your stove. My concern with burning old timbers is they can burn really hot and you don't know where they've been. If it looks like oil soaked flooring timbers from an old knitting mill factory you probably don't want to load up the stove with it. Who knows how a burn rate could be affected. Like burning pallets - you never know what could have been spilled on them. If a piece doesn't look or smell right or good, get rid of it somewhere. Sure looks like decent dry wood to burn. I've burned a bunch of old barn wood no one wanted myself.
A buddy got almost a pick up full of used bowling pins...put 4 of them in on cherry hot coals....oh yeah! bowling pins burn like a rocket, couldn't throw sand on it fast enough and shut the stove down fast enough...whoa.
Bowling pins burn extremely well. They are made of hard maple. They are coated with (or at least used to be, I don't know what they are made of today) Nylon or Surlyn. In modern times, we probably wouldn't burn plastic. In a different time, the plastic burned with a bright flame and dripped slowly down while on fire. Between the bone dry hard maple and the dripping flaming plastic, it is absolutely beautiful in an open fireplace.
I cut them into 16” pieces. I wont burn the landscape timber , just in case. I have some more pics after the cut. Do they look fine? And for the record, I don’t intend to run stove all with this lumbers. Since they are very dry, below %10 MC, I intend to mix them with not so ideal firewood , around %25 MC, if that makes sense.
My neighbor told me a story about her husband throwing a plastic toilet seat in the wood furnace where they used to rent. She said all the fire detectors went off and the floor right above the furnace was hot but thankfully it didn't burn the house down.
