I Burned Oak, Pine and a 50/50 Mix, 22 Pounds a Night, for a Month. One of them yielded extra hours.

Somebody told you pine is trash and oak is the only wood worth stacking. Tonight you will load the oak and leave the pine for kindling, because that is what everybody does. I burned twenty-two pounds a night for a month, ten nights of red oak, ten of white pine, ten of both in the same load, all at eighteen to twenty percent on a fresh face, on the same bed of coals, at the same air setting. One of the three beat the other two by an hour a night, every night, and it is not the one you are about to put in the stove. What is in here: the oak nights, and the eighteen minutes nobody counts. The pine nights, and what it won while it was losing. The mix. The pipe thermometer eighteen inches up for thirty nights, which is the answer to the creosote comment you are already typing, and which wood actually put my flue in the tar zone. Why a mix can beat its best part, with the arithmetic. And the sixth, which is how to load it so it works in your stove, the ratio, the order, and the one load where pure oak still wins. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five winters on this stove. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: dry against dry, eighteen to twenty percent on a fresh split face, is the whole test. Pine at thirty makes creosote; oak at thirty makes more. Keep pine out of an open fireplace. Catalytic stoves: follow the manual on engagement; a fast pine start can run the combustor hot. By the pound, dry species are within a few percent of each other (extension service tables); oak wins by the cord because a cord of oak weighs more.