I Burned the Same Cord in Three Different Split Sizes. One Gave Me Two More Hours a Night.

You load at ten and get up at five to a bed of gray with a black chunk in it, and you blame the wood. The wood is probably fine. What decides whether that fire is still working at five in the morning is how big the pieces are, and the man who split it never asked you what size you wanted. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011. Last winter I took one cord of red oak off the same tree, all at 18% on the meter, split it three ways, and burned it at 22 pounds a load on a kitchen scale, six nights each, with a thermometer on the stove top, one on the pipe, one in a bedroom 31 feet away, and a white rag through the clean-out every morning. The numbers: wrist size, about 3 inches - stove top 480 in 25 minutes, pipe 380, coals at 1 hour 40, rag light gray. Forearm size, about 5 inches - 440, pipe 310, coals at 3 hours 20, rag gray. Thigh size, 8 inches and up - 360, pipe under 250 for four hours, coals at 5 hours 30, and by the third morning the rag came out black and tacky. The big load really does buy you two more hours. It also very nearly cost me a chimney. The last thing on the list is how to keep the two hours and throw the black rag away, and it is what an old camp cook on Shavers Fork was doing in front of me in 1969 while I stood there thinking it was luck. Tell me your state, what stove you run, and how long a normal load lasts you. And if your stove has secondary tubes or a catalyst, run the big load and tell me what your pipe does, because mine is old and yours is not. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. Notes: one stove, one winter, one species, in a 900 square foot cabin with a straight pipe. Bigger fireboxes and catalytic or tube stoves behave differently with a big load, because they are built to burn the smoke mine sends up the flue. Chimney Safety Institute of America: creosote condenses below roughly 250F in the pipe. EPA Burn Wise: under 20% moisture on a freshly split face. Changing split size does not remove a coat that is already on the wall; brush the flue. #firewood #woodstove #woodheat #homestead #oldways