Your Firewood Is Not Dry and You Have 8 Weeks. The Old Logger Trick That Saves the Winter

Go out to the rank tonight with a flashlight and a hatchet. Pick a piece from the middle of the pile, split it, and put your cheek against the fresh face. If it is cool and smells like a cut tree instead of a barn, that wood is not dry, and it does not matter what the receipt says. It is the first week of October. You have eight weeks before the stove runs every night. Six pieces, in order. How to measure what you actually have, thirty pieces into three piles. Why the middle pile gets split in half again. The three decisions that put a pile where the wind is. The week inside by the stove, and what seven days in a stove room does to the number. How to burn wood that is at twenty-three and not twenty without paying for it in the chimney. And the sixth, which is the piece of your pile that is not going to make December no matter what you do, how to know which piece that is on the first Saturday in October, and what to do about it while it is still an errand and not an emergency. In October 2014 my son bought two cords of oak sold as seasoned. The first piece I split read thirty-four percent. He had it burning clean the week after Thanksgiving, and the part he could not save was the best wood he burned the winter after. I kept the numbers. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five Octobers starting with a pile wetter than I wanted. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: if you run a catalytic stove, do not burn damp wood on my say so. The combustor is a four hundred dollar part and wet wood is what ruins it. Keep any indoor rack outside the clearance in your stove manual. Twenty percent on a fresh split face is the EPA Burn Wise number, not mine.