Wood Stacks

In anticipation of our new wood stove, I bought three face cords of firewood from a local guy who delivers.  

Can I just say how much I love people who aren't afraid to work?   Who are friendly and knowledgeable?  Who chop firewood and Bring It To My House So I Don't Have To?    I love all you guys!

Lee Franklin brought us a very generous three cords and managed to back in and drop it as close as possible to where we stacked it, saving us many steps since we had planned to have it dropped further down the hill and walk it to the stacks.   Thank you, Lee!   

All of our planning brought up a lot of questions about wood and stacking wood and measuring wood, etc.   Here are some links to great information about firewood.  Hopefully you'll find something to help you, too.

How much wood is in a cord?   Here's a page from woodburning.org that tells you all about it.   We got face cords, which is enough 18" long pieces of wood to fill a rack that is 8' long and 4' high.   I'm hoping that 5 of those will get us through the winter.   [We had some wood stacked already in addition to the new stuff.]

What's the best way to stack wood?  Everyone has an opinion about that.   Here are some interesting links all about it.

• Cornell University recommends stacking it off the ground and covering with something other than a tarp.  No more than 2 layers deep [across].  We're doing it this way.   
• Stihl [the chainsaw guys] has an interesting section on stacking and shows three ways to do it, including the Shaker round stacks.
• Mother Earth News has a long article about stacking wood.

What kind of wood is good to burn?

• Woodheat.org is a great resource and has a handy dandy chart of the types of wood they recommend burning.   Note:  The important thing is to know how much heat you're likely to get out of one type of wood or another.   Hard woods give lots of heat.  Soft woods don't, but they're easier to control for things like cooking.

How do you cover the stacks?  Ideally, you put your wood in a wood shed.   We don't have a wood shed and if we did, it would be home to mice, snakes and wasps.   No fun.   Our wood piles are out in the open and we covered them with assorted scraps of metal roofing, plywood, old broken toboggans.   Some folks say to use tarps, but where we are, that keeps the wet in and encourages mold.   If we need to, we can fold a tarp and put it across the top, but not cover the whole stack.   

We stacked our wood with plenty of holes between the logs and we also oriented our stacks so the prevailing winds blow through the wood.   We put 4 feet between stacks so it's easy to get the mower between them and plenty of air circulation. These little things can help encourage the wood to dry here.