I split these two "green"Red Oak splits yesterday. The tree was downed about 1 month ago, but was never bucked until yesterday. I just weighed them, and marked them and put them back on the top of a stack, un covered. I'll re weigh them every so often and post updates. Let's see how it goes. I was fascinated when somebody else did this a while back. Weigh in #1 01/11/2015 Split #1 16.2 lbs Split #2 9.8 lbs
Well, how often would you like? I was thinking every week for a month or two, then once a month for a couple years. Better make a B-I-G batch!! Not sure how often that is? Is that every forty nights? OR every night? OR every four nights? OR.... ??
With the pieces uncovered I suggest you also weigh immediately before and after it rains or else you won't be able to figure out why they are sometimes gaining weight, enough weight to think that your scale is busted. (And then you will come to your own conclusion from what you know apart from what everybody else says about covering wood.) You also might want to find yourself a scale that does grams. You'll get a lot more granularity in your measurements and see what is going on better, like when the loss slows way down when the easy water is gone. Or when they gain a little weight in the fall as you will probably start to see after the second summer. A change of .1 lb is going to be a little less than 1% change in moisture content with your bigger piece and probably just over 2% with your smaller piece.
I know a lot of people that are trying to lose weight but I did not know of any red oak splits that are....until now!
You slipped that in there but good advice for the test, the fact is that moisture from rain is removed fairly quickly with dry sunny days.
I'm not 100% certain your weight sensitivity is going to be enough to discern the level of "dryness". Have you thought about weighing them in grams or even ounces, to get a little more sensitivity to the figures? Just a thought.
We will see, but I agree and have results to prove it already, with oldspark. When it rains, the outside of the splits get soaking wet, but very little or none is soaked into the wood, unless it is raining and wet for weeks. As an example, it was pooring yesterday, they were soaking wet, dripping with water. This morning, the sun is shining and it's a normal very dry winter day today in the upper 20's / lower 30's. I looked at the stack today and it is bone, and I mean bone dry as if they had never been rained on. It may slow the process of letting water get out of the split, but only by the number of days they are wet from rain. So if it rains two days, it will be two days longer to dry, but that is over a 6 month or whatever period, so it is really immaterial. That's just my opionion of course, nothing scientific. But that has been my observation over the last few years. I was also playing with my moister meter last night, and actually got it to get some decent readings in a few splits in the house (aka at room temperature). I'm going to take a few readings of these splits and see if I can't get a decent reading, but I will not rely on that much. It won't be perfect, but it sure will show us what it is doing. From previous results of people trying this, a 10th of a pound will be just fine resolution for this. If the splits are 40% right now, that means they will loose 20 or 30% of their weight to get to 10 or 20% moister. 30% of 16.2 is 4.9 pounds, so the 16.2 lb split could feasibly end up weighing just 11.3 lbs. 4.9lbs is 78.4 ounces, or 6 1/2 BEERS!! That means over a six pack of beer will come out of one split! That makes me thirsty just thinking about it!!
[QUOTE="It won't be perfect, but it sure will show us what it is doing. From previous results of people trying this, a 10th of a pound will be just fine resolution for this. If the splits are 40% right now, that means they will loose 20 or 30% of their weight to get to 10 or 20% moister. 30% of 16.2 is 4.9 pounds, so the 16.2 lb split could feasibly end up weighing just 11.3 lbs. 4.9lbs is 78.4 ounces, or 6 1/2 BEERS!! That means over a sick pack of beer will come out of one split! That makes me thirsty just thinking about it!![/QUOTE] That makes sense on the resolution. I think you're mixing your units on the beer measurement (weight vs. volume) but I still love the analogy! I drink the silo's though so it would be a few less
You get 6 1/2 bottles of beer out of a red oak split and I predict a sudden and drastic drop off in the burning of that wood. And an increase in the number of them cut down.... I assume the term 'sick pack' was a typo but if not, it was pretty funny. OK, even if it was a typo it is pretty funny. Brian
I think that you are right with your wood not being that much impacted by yesterday's rain. But I think that is because it is still rather saturated being green of the stump within the month. I think you will see much different things going on with water re-absorption from a thunderstorm once some of the water gets out of that wood come summertime. A scale can show what the outside of the wood can't. But that's the fun of doing it yourself. What you observe will be what you go with. You are right that your wood will lose about 30% by weight, maybe even 35%. But weight loss doesn't correlate it 1-1 with moisture content. If your piece is at 40% moisture content, a 14.2% drop in weight will bring it to 20%, 21.5% loss by weight will make 40% moisture content become 10%. A 30% drop in weight is impossible for a piece of wood at 40% moisture. There isn't that much water by weight in it. My guess is that the moisture content that you have now is probably between 75-85%. A 33% loss by weight brings a piece of wood at 80% to 20% moisture content.
