I have been stewing on this a few days now, and I am in a way different climate at 64 degrees north latitude, so grab your salt grains...
I process 12-15 cords of green wood annually. I keep 10, give the rest away on my karma account. The ten I keep lose about 18% volume while seasoning, so my ten green cords becomes eight seasoned cords. I think of my self as a small time operator. I am kinda at the limit for being small time, but really I am in the same weight class as the guys burning 2-3 cords annually. Other than an electric splitter and a 16" chainsaw I do it all by hand. I don't have any kids home to help, I don't have any hired help, Just me. I do have a pickemup truck as a DD, but no dump trailer or log skidder...
OTOH I do maybe have a little better handle on the reality of burning 20-30 cords per year since it's only 2-3x what I am doing, compared to many other small time operators.
@Rockey , more power to you filling the apex of the roof of that shed once, but I think it will be time consuming enough that you won't bother doing it twice.
If I was going to triple my annual through put, I would absolutely go to a firebox with a loading door on the outside of the house. Carrying that much wood through the house in a season, even a nice long one like mine, would be an insane waste of time. 30 cords in 6 months for my season, 5 cords a month, coming through a man door into the house one armload at a time, no way.
I would probably start with an ATV and large trailer so I could bring a boxfull of wood to the firebox in one trip, and then just have to toss it in. A front end loader would be really tempting, maybe tractor mounted with a backhoe on the back for balance and then drag a bush hog with the same tractor in summer. After the wife approved the tractor purchase there would be an ATV on the property...
At ten cords annually, I don't stack any more. It is too time consuming. My kiln modules are at 8 feet long max specifically so I can just dump the wood in there, get the ends of all the splits kinda flush and go on. Much over 8 feet between uprights the stacks tend to fall over as they season, and I HATE having to restack firewood in fishing season. Or camping season. Or hunting season, really, I pretty much hate having to stack wood twice no matter what, but it is especially odious in the summer months.
For 3x my current volume, no more stacking. Somehow my splits would not be touched by hand again from coming off the splitter to going in the firebox. I have thought of two options.
One option would be those metal cages that fit on pallets. There is a name for them that I don't remember. I doubt they hold more than about 42 cuft, Rockey would need 60 to 90 of them. With that kind of setup he could build a spacious greenhouse for plants that would improve the eventual resale value of the property, put in an overhead door, operate it as a wood drying kiln, fill the metal cages right at the splitter, handle the cages with a forklift from splitter, within greenhouse and onto the trailer going to the firebox... and then have to handle the wood again between metal pallet mounted cage and firebox.
My other less expensive idea would take more space. I tried this small scale when I lived in central North Carolina with encouraging results, but some tweaking would be in order. What I did was lay down a tarp folded in half on the ground, so double thickness tarp. Then I tossed green splits on it, being kinda careful not to puncture, but not stacking at all, just piling the splits. Just heaped up. Then I took some smaller long branches from the slash cut and arranged them kinda like rafters on the heap of splits, or like the poles on a tent. I didn't go crazy with workmanship on this. It was late summer, 2007 I think, I was up to my ears in green wood for next winter and figured it was worth a try. Then I spread a layer of clear plastic over all that like a kiln roof, and then a few more long skinny branches to hold the plastic down. I want to guess that was September 2007. I don't remember when temps dropped below freezing that year, but the wood in that heap was the first stuff dry enough to burn in the summer of 2008.
With that latter option I think it would have done better if I had put some kind of hole in the top to let hot humid air out, but oriented somehow that rain couldn't fall down in. Like just a section of 6" stove pipe stuck through a 6" hole in the plastic and laid on top of the heap horizontally. Hot humid air out, no rain in, Bob's your uncle. With this option Rockey could just drag his splitter down the folded tarp as his splits piled up behind him, then toss into a trailer after seasoning, and then handle from trailer to firebox. Dimensions would be limited by local commonly available materials.
I got this idea from the silage tubes you see lying on the ground on dairy farms. There's miles and miles of them visible from the interstate in some areas. I asked about them once at a gas station surrounded by them, the old guy behind the register said the stuff inside will still be warm in dead of winter.
I had another idea about storage sizing. My baseboard system runs at 27 psi, the boiler kicks on when the water in the system is down to 140dF and kicks off when the water in the system is back up to 180dF. I could look at my oil bill to figure out how many BTUs the boiler is going through within those parameters. It ought to be a fairly simple math problem to solve at say +10dF Rockey's log cabin will go through x many BTUs, but he only has time to operate the OWB twice so he needs y gallons of storage and he needs to heat them up to z dF to get through 24 hours of calls from the hot water circuits in the house. I bet an engineering graduate still making loan payments would solve that math problem for two pizzas and a six pack of beer.
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