I hauled four loads of hackberry firewood home and two loads are in this picture waiting for c/s/s. Each row was around 800 pounds and the four loads of hackberry totaled around 3600 pounds. I scaled one piece and calculated 55 pounds per cubic foot which is very dense for green hackberry. If the high density holds up during drying then I will beat red oak by a large margin, i.e. lots of wood for less drying time. I do not know why this tree is so heavy. I started wedge splitting some and clean rounds split easy while knots required the chainsaw. The largest cuts on the hackberry was 15" and the Makita cut well since the wood was green.
So... how did choosing hackberry over red oak work out one year later? After one year inside in a face row, one of six rows with 4-6" gaps between, a fresh split hackberry round tested 18% moisture and is part of the mix (white oak, white ash, and hackberry) being fed into the furnace and burns well. I decided to use the outside row, row 1, for wood able to dry in one year since my indoor storage is space limited. If row 1 continues to produce dry wood after 1 year than I can afford to leave oak in the in the other rows as long as it takes to dry... I use up to two of the six rows each year. Row 1 was filled with green hackberry, dead/bark free slippery elm (red), and dead white ash one year ago which are all testing around 18% moisture. Hackberry has less moisture than most wood, second to white ash and hornbeam, which combined with a lower density allowed the 1 year drying.
Posting here that you past up on some sloppy,stinking, drippy, seepy Red Oak because you didn’t want to grow old & let your hair go gray or fall out before it dried enough to use it will have some of these firewood snobs showing up at your place with pitchforks & torches.... Hackberry & Slippery Elm are good quality firewoods. It’s your operation run it the way that works best for you.
Sounds like someone’s bitter that double OO got his butt handed to him by the true firewood king RO!!!
