Your Firewood Is Going Too Fast. 7 Nightly Habits That Eat the Pile. Number 4 Is on Your Damper

Go out to the rank tonight and count the rows. Count them again the first of November. Most houses have burned a row and a half more than the calendar says, and they do what my father did every winter of his life: blame the wood, blame the stove, and buy another cord in February at February prices. The wood is fine. Seven things you do between supper and bed are eating that pile, one split at a time, and the fourth one is the worst of them, and your hand is on it every night at ten o'clock. In the order you do them: tonight's wood coming in tonight. The end of the stack you pull from. The ash you shovel out every morning. The fourth, which is the one careful thing you do all day and the one that sends a third of the pile up the chimney without warming the house. The door cracked to get it going. The rooms nobody is in. And two fires a day instead of one. Each one with the test you can run tonight, and what it costs in splits. From my grandfather's tally book, the column nobody else keeps: cords stacked, cords burned. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five winters counting the rows. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: these seven are for a stove with a working air control and a chimney that draws. A leaky old box stove with no gasket may need the air choked; do not run it wide open on my say so. A pipe thermometer eighteen inches up is twelve dollars; below 250 degrees you are not burning the gas, you are coating the flue with it. Wood at thirty percent on a fresh split face eats a pile faster than all seven habits together; fix that first.