# How to survive a burning season with unseasoned firewood?



## newburn (Oct 30, 2016)

As suggested in a post I made over at https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/vc-encore-2040-how-to-burn.156965/, I need some help.

I have been having trouble getting my new stove to heat up and burn properly.  This is my first season burning and have just started to acquire wood this fall.  I have some oak slab wood that is supposed to be dried.  I also have been cutting dead locust.  Some of the members think that it may be a wood issue.

I don't know what would be the best route to take to get wood that is ready to burn this season.  I am looking for suggestions and/or tips to get me through this winter.

Thanks!


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## jatoxico (Oct 30, 2016)

Compressed bricks or kiln dried wood mixed in with your wet wood works but will cost some bucks. Pallets and lumber scraps work too and can usually be had for nuthin' except you gotta work for it.

For your existing wood splitting it down smaller so you can build airy fires will help.

Can be done and most have done it.


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## BenTN (Oct 30, 2016)

I would start with a cheap moisture meter, I got one from harbor freight. This way you can get an idea if it is your wood being the issue. If it is your wood you can also use the meter to test any wood you purchase prior to taking delivery. Resplit and test a piece before he dumps it.

They do sell pressed wood blocks which would be an option for you. I think I saw tractor supply selling for $300+/ton. Someone else correct me if I'm wrong but I thought a ton was equal to a cord. Pricey but an option if you need heat.


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## gzecc (Oct 30, 2016)

Collect for next year and the following year. Burn oil or gas this year. They are cheap. Having seasoned wood is kind of a necessity. for a stove or insert.


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## Jay106n (Oct 30, 2016)

Collect now for next year. Do fire bricks this winter or like gzecc said just do oil. Its not worth burning wet wood. You will do more harm than good.


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## red oak (Oct 30, 2016)

Most of us have burned unseasoned wood our first burning seasons - I know I did.  If you decide you will burn wood as opposed to using oil or gas, split as small as you can.  Try to get some more slabs or pallet wood.  Get a good bed of coals and keep the fire hot, and check your chimney often.  Softwood may be an option depending on where you are - it dries much faster.  If you know anyone who is years ahead maybe you could work out a wood trade.  That's pretty much all I got - except that the first year with unseasoned wood can be a struggle.  Took awhile for me to learn how to do it right.  Maybe this mild winter will stay with us for awhile.


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## Dobish (Oct 30, 2016)

Craigslist, pallets, construction scraps, small fires that burn hot. Leave the air open and don't expect overnight burns. Get a good bed of coals, and keep it hot. Don't worry about being efficient, just worry about getting ready for next season


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## newburn (Oct 30, 2016)

When you burn construction material or pallet wood are you concerned with nails, etc being in it?  I know my manual advises against burning this type of material.

I think I will grab one of the moisture detectors and post my results.  Thanks for the tips so far.


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## jatoxico (Oct 30, 2016)

The concern is usually about burning paints, glues and other finishes. Common nails won't hurt anything. Galvanized with a CAT??


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## Dobish (Oct 30, 2016)

My biggest issue with burning wood with nails was having them get caught in the grate, and scratching up the ash pan.


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## Dobish (Oct 30, 2016)

Take the cat out if you are really concerned.


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## JabaduGarfunkle (Oct 30, 2016)

I had about 3/4 of what I expect to need this winter so this weekend me and my wife went out and cut down 2 truck loads of standing (or mostly hung up as it fell) dead from a neighbor's wooded area.  After bucking it up I found a little was punky but most seems solid and dry.  Those 2 loads gave me an extra cord I can use this winter.  If I do this a few more times I'll be set for a rough winter.

I found I have to be really choosy what I cut down and even after cutting some down I realized it was rotten and left it.  I tested a couple pieces in the stove on Saturday and it lit up really well with no sizzle so I'm optimistic.  If you have access to any kind of wooded area consider giving it a try. 

 If we hustled we could get a truckload (in 8-10' pieces -each length was 5 to 12" diameter) loaded up and dropped off at home in about an hour and a half... Probably 4 truckloads in a day before we're pooped out which would end up being 2 cords.  Considering I don't have to split it since it's already so dry (although I do when I test a piece) its a quick way to bolster the supply.


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## STIHLY DAN (Oct 30, 2016)

My 1st year burning I had everything split and stacked by memorial day. That winter I found the oak was not burning. I had to leave it in the basement for the winter, which produced a crap load of moisture to the house. With the low cost of oil and gas it would be best to wait till next year to burn. Frankly, at these price's its silly for anyone to burn wood at this point. i would skip the year but I have no other option than wood.


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## Jay106n (Oct 30, 2016)

STIHLY DAN said:


> My 1st year burning I had everything split and stacked by memorial day. That winter I found the oak was not burning. I had to leave it in the basement for the winter, which produced a crap load of moisture to the house. With the low cost of oil and gas it would be best to wait till next year to burn. Frankly, at these price's its silly for anyone to burn wood at this point. i would skip the year but I have no other option than wood.



Agreed, but if the wood is free, it is still cheaper than cheap oil


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## FaithfulWoodsman (Oct 30, 2016)

All said above is excellent advice. Deff get a meter, split some pieces in half and check the fresh split. If your wood moisture is 25% or over I would buy bricks or wait till next year........ unless......you have or can get access to some woods. There are three trees in Ohio and prob your part of PA that can be burned immediately if cut dead standing.
 Ash, especially dry tops and if the bark is falling off portions. 
 Black cherry, but only if the sapwood has started to get punky. Cherry rots from the outside in so if the outside is going the inside can be bone dry. 
Elm, but only with the bark falling off or gone. 
Other trees dead or dying don't seem to be that dry, but I regularly find all three of these trees with wood at 15-20% moisture content and ready to burn good.


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## Jay106n (Oct 30, 2016)

FaithfulWoodsman said:


> All said above is excellent advice. Deff get a meter, split some pieces in half and check the fresh split. If your wood moisture is 25% or over I would buy bricks or wait till next year........ unless......you have or can get access to some woods. There are three trees in Ohio and prob your part of PA that can be burned immediately if cut dead standing.
> Ash, especially dry tops and if the bark is falling off portions.
> Black cherry, but only if the sapwood has started to get punky. Cherry rots from the outside in so if the outside is going the inside can be bone dry.
> Elm, but only with the bark falling off or gone.
> Other trees dead or dying don't seem to be that dry, but I regularly find all three of these trees with wood at 15-20% moisture content and ready to burn good.



+1 on the Ash and Black Cherry. Both dry fast and burn great. Black Cherry coals up better than Ash. Both have good BTUs with little seasoning time. If you can find them standing dead, even better.


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## CheapBassTurd (Oct 31, 2016)

Our first winter was this last season and we started in winter with no stock other than a few weeks of 
scrounging the forest at home and roadside dead limbs.

I was able to stay weeks to only a few days ahead on wood, wet or dry.   We were drying the stuff
on the hearth and tossing it in.  Laid off, no cash available to buy wood as we were paying off the stove
install.  Rocky start indeed but we stayed warm.

Kept collecting/ splitting almost daily and am now 2 years ahead as this season kicks off.   I learned really
fast how to follow the Asplundh guys around, grab and split their drops concentrating on the dead trees they
felled.  Pallets work great but they cook fast and leave plenty of ashes to clean out but they are available
next to dumpsters at many businesses.   Dead and dry stuff can be collected up while building a real split
wood pile.   City and county garbage dumps have wood sections which some major jackpots have been posted
here on the site.  These guys take pics of everything.  Now I do too.  LOL     If you get busy and stay busy you'll
be way ahead way fast.   After getting a year or two ahead there's little stress and the stove lifestyle becomes
quite rewarding.

Welcome, and enjoy your stove and this site,

CheapMark


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## ctswf (Oct 31, 2016)

Last year i had some wood i thought was a little wet, i bought it and it had been split earlier that year

I split it even smaller and bought a 4x4x4 pallet of "hot bricks" for around $300. Mixed them in, i did fine. I had about a softball sized amount of creosote cleaned out this year.

Some stoves say not to burn bricks, especially cat stoves i think


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## maple1 (Oct 31, 2016)

Lots of good suggestions above. If you can't get drier stuff, you might be stuck with oil/gas/whatever your other heat source is.

You can get what you have to dry faster, by re-splitting small, stacking loosely in a warm dry place, and setting up a box fan on low speed blowing across the pile. A warm stove or furnace room in winter is great for that - inside air is usually quite dry then anyway. Starting to do that right now won't help much right now, but it might come into play in January-February when it's really cold. I would still be scrounging whatever you can find that is dry though - between that & the resplitting thing, you will be having a busy winter & it won't be easy. Which brings us back to the oil/gas/whatever possibility.

You should also be working at getting next winters wood ready now too, BTW. Another factor to consider when weighing the oil/gas/whatever option....


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## newburn (Oct 31, 2016)

newburn said:


> When you burn construction material or pallet wood are you concerned with nails, etc being in it?  I know my manual advises against burning this type of material.
> 
> I think I will grab one of the moisture detectors and post my results.  Thanks for the tips so far.



Is treated wood ok to burn?


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## jatoxico (Oct 31, 2016)

newburn said:


> Is treated wood ok to burn?


No.


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## newburn (Oct 31, 2016)

I have a permit to cut dead wood at a local military depot.  How can I easily identify ash and black cherry?  This is a large property (1000+ acres) which I am not very familiar with.


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## Jay106n (Oct 31, 2016)

newburn said:


> I have a permit to cut dead wood at a local military depot.  How can I easily identify ash and black cherry?  This is a large property (1000+ acres) which I am not very familiar with.



Ash is relatively simple to ID. Mature trees have a diamond like bark pattern and the leaves and branches grow symmetrical opposites.





Black cherry has a black scaly bark that peals off if you pick at it. They grow generally straight, but kinda wonky with small bends and turns in the trunk.




Good luck!


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## FaithfulWoodsman (Oct 31, 2016)

Great education Jay! Do a youtube search for both and you will find some good info. Cherry can sometimes be easy to find as they typically look black or the darkest tree from a distance. The bark looks like dark gray or black corn flakes are glued onto the tree. The heartwood smells sweet and is a redish orange color. Ash is easy, but can look like a lot of other bark too if your eye is not trained. One way to identify ash 100% is to remove some of the bark off dead or dying tree and look for emerald ash borer larvae lines underneath, it's unmistakable.

EAB lines and hole in bark.














BLack Cherry and red heartwood





Remember Dead cherry will have many limbs broken off and punky bark, sometimes with fungi starting.
Have at it man. It can be done and learning is fun too. Here is a pic of a full ready to burn load  of cherry I got last Feb, when we were running low.


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## red oak (Oct 31, 2016)

I don't think any of those woods are ok to burn green, as in cut live.  I burn mostly oak, but any wood dead standing may have some wood that's burnable immediately, usually the top half to third as well as smaller branches and limbs.


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## FaithfulWoodsman (Oct 31, 2016)

red oak said:


> I don't think any of those woods are ok to burn green, as in cut live.  I burn mostly oak, but any wood dead standing may have some wood that's burnable immediately, usually the top half to third as well as smaller branches and limbs.


Absolutely, only dead standing will be dry at all. Wish I had more oak like you. Lots around but very few dying or dead, which is what I have permission to cut. Do have 27 dead ash and 3 dead cherry marked for this winter. I cut some for my older neighbor which they use that year, but most of it will be ready. All three cherry trees are almost telephone poles and prob dry to the stump. In return I get free use of their splitter.


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## Lcback (Nov 1, 2016)

I would cut anything dead that is off the ground. A lot of that stuff looks nasty. But if it's off the ground and hard on the inside it's probably good to go.

Like the others said gas,oil,lp. Is all cheap this year. 
I just ordered lp. 1.58 a gallon. I'll have to find a fuel calculator, but I bet it's close to the price of hard coal or a cord of wood. Even if it's a little more then wood at least it's ready to burn now. I bought a brand new wood furnace this summer. But I have only burned it twice so far. With lp. This cheap it doesn't take much to keep the house 68. Once the temp drops into the 30's and I hear the lp furnace running multiple times I will fire up the furnace. In the mean time I'm saving my wood for  February. 

Try not to panic. Most of us have burnt green wood when starting out. My self last year. So if it is nessicary light that fire. Give it lots of air or 2x4 scrap mixed in. Check the chimney often. If smoke rolls back in the house with the door shut put it out. 
I was so dumb I used a ton of cardboard to start my fires and 2 90* elbows befor the chimney tee. It clogged in a month. Smoke was coming out the air intakes  no matter what I did even with the door shut. My in law came over started smacking the black pipe. What looked like a squirrels nest of card board came falling out, and the fire took right off. Then I started reading this sight. I made it through that winter with wet wood. But I learned a lot too. My wife was none too impressed with this wood heat I talked so much about. Lol. I'm for seeing this year a huge improvement. 

Last but not least. Don't forget to get some c0 detectors. That stuff kills a family around here it seems every year. 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## Woody Stover (Nov 1, 2016)

If you can scrounge a woodlot, that's your best option. Go after small, dead-standing stuff with no bark left. But I've also found Black Cherry on the ground, ten or twelve inches, with all the sapwood rotted off. It's rot-resistant wood, and the heartwood was in great shape and MC was <20%...ready to burn that day. The problem with splitting wood very small, or using construction scraps, is that you have a stove that can get too hot if you get too much wood gassing at once. You might load a bunch of small splits that are damp, but once they dry out and start gassing, it might be hard to control. Better to find dead, dry wood to use in a woodlot. Then you can split bigger and it will burn in a more controlled fashion.
The first winter after I got 'dry-wood religion' here, I split a dead White Ash that I found, medium-small. It was at 25%. I stacked half a cord in the house with a fan on it, and it was down around 20% within a couple weeks.


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## firefighterjake (Nov 1, 2016)

I lucked out in my first year of burning . . . that summer I cut a bunch of standing dead elm (with the bark missing) and some tree tops from a wood harvesting operation. In addition I cut up pallets and used those to help get the fire going. Honestly, it wasn't that bad and I thought I was doing very well.

However, in Year 2, when I was burning wood seasoned for over a year I discovered just how enjoyable burning truly seasoned wood could be -- easier to ignite, longer burns and less gunk on the "glass" and in the chimney.

I guess my answer would be dependent on just how unseasoned the wood is . . . if the wood is quite far from being dry I would save it for next year and either burn oil/gas or perhaps buy some Bio-Bricks (or similar products.) If the wood is close to being dry enough to burn, I might suggest mixing in pallet wood (which you can often get free) or dimensional scrap lumber (which can often be found for free.)


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## sportbikerider78 (Nov 1, 2016)

STIHLY DAN said:


> My 1st year burning I had everything split and stacked by memorial day. That winter I found the oak was not burning. I had to leave it in the basement for the winter, which produced a crap load of moisture to the house. With the low cost of oil and gas it would be best to wait till next year to burn. Frankly, at these price's its silly for anyone to burn wood at this point. i would skip the year but I have no other option than wood.



Still saving money.  A FC delivered is $55 here.

Plus..I drop a lot of my own and my wife loves the stove.


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## Dobish (Nov 1, 2016)

a full cord of pine around here is 190$ delivered.... oak goes up to $300/cord

i guess if I do the math, I paid roughly $600/cord to take the trees down, and i have scrounged another 4-5 cord, so it comes out to around $150/cord for all of the wood that i have gathered.... 

i burn less than a cord a month, and save over $100/month on my gas bill, so in the end, even if i had to pay for full cords, it would be better than using my furnace!


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## newburn (Nov 1, 2016)

Yeah, I'm stuck with baseboard electric if I don't use my stove and it was fairly pricey last year.

I am going to try and determine the moisture content of the wood I have currently and hope it is close to 20-30%.  Maybe try to mix in some pallet wood and hope I can find some dead ash on my wood cutting trip.  Thanks for all the help so far!


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## peakbagger (Nov 2, 2016)

jatoxico said:


> The concern is usually about burning paints, glues and other finishes. Common nails won't hurt anything. Galvanized with a CAT??



Sorry to be late to this post, Cats can be poisoned by metals, they wont stop working with a few pallet nails which frequently contain lead as well as zinc but its likely the Cat is going to degrade quicker.


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## Allagash350 (Nov 2, 2016)

I think it depends on how badly you want to burn. Like others have said there are ways to get dry wood, but this time of year you will pay a premium. 
Call a tree service, see if they will sell you dead oak or maple limbs that were too big for the chipper, call asplundh and see where they've been cutting for a utility company. 
Buy wood. 
Or just wait until next year, which is what I would probably do.


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## maple1 (Nov 2, 2016)

Even if you wait until next year to burn, you should still be working at getting wood ready. Getting ahead is where it's at, and the further ahead, the better. You'll be extremely thankful you did, this time next year.


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## Destructor (Nov 2, 2016)

Dead wood is out there and a lot of it will dry quickly after it is split. Keep an eye out for new construction. They throw away a lot of good framing scraps. I stumbled upon some dumped cherry last fall, cut to fireplace length. It had been sitting for a few years. I got all the good stuff. Sopping wet when I split it but so dead the bark was falling off, some punk around the perimeter on some of the pieces but mostly solid. It dried in about a week in the sun and burned beautifully during the winter. I’ve been hauling out dumped dead red cedar from the same location this fall, same thing, wet from rain but dry in a week after splitting. My tulip that I scrounged in March is ready to burn. I may throw in a couple pieces of locust this winter and see how that burns, cut live in March and left at the side of the road. I've scrounged all my wood, luckily mostly already long dead.


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## Diabel (Nov 2, 2016)

It is very hard to get ahead three years with wood inventory. Especially in urban setting, with work and busy family. But it is possible believe me I did it. 

I burn three full cords per season and guess what I have to process three cords per year to stay ahead three yrs. In the end it is rewarding for sure! Not only that you save tons on gas, gym memberships etc. but what I like most, is that wood heat in the dead of winter....


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