oldspark said:
pen said:
I have lots of faith in science, not so much in moisture meters. I watched 3 different ones probe the heck out of the same pieces of wood and the one was reading the in the single digits, the others in the mid teens, the other in the mid 20's. Which one do I trust? (The one btw was a very fancy SS job w/ a built in slide hammer for driving the pins in). The other two were personal lower dollar units.
At the end of the day I really don't give a flying poo what the actual moisture is, all I know is when loaded in the stove Dennis's wood took off a ton quicker than the wood that the woodstock guys had around which if you asked had been sitting in doors at the factory since this time last winter. In fact, guess what wood they (the woodstock employees) used when people were starting to really show up and want to see that puppy in action w/out fuss.
Proof is in the puddin'.
pen
Well my MM has been in tune with my "real world" findings so that is why I trust mine, not sure why so many people are skeptical of certain things.
OS, I think we have the same one, don't we? The blue HF $12 jobbie? All I know is that I compared mine to wood that I later did an oven-dry MC test on several occasions and it was always within a few percentage points of the true MC. Even a $500 meter won't be any more accurate than that at firewood moisture levels.
I don't think the "proof is in the puddin" is something to stake your life on....
I have said this many times, so don't throw a brick at me for saying it once more. The photo in my avatar was taken about one second after I flung open the doors of my Vig. Inside there is about 20 pounds of black birch that just doesn't get much wetter - about 57.5% MC as very carefully determined by using the oven-dry method (sorry, no meter in the world will give accurate results on a MC that high). You are seeing exactly what I saw: no smoke at all in the box, no smoke from the flue, and no smoke from the flue when I shut the bypass and sent her into secondary combustion 20 minutes or so later. Stove at 700ºF, flue temp
stable at about 450º once in secondary (downdraft) mode.
How is this possible? I know, I know... you'd
never be able to do that in an EPA stove. Well, I might say that the old VCs were capable of achieving secondary combustion, and I do it all the time with my stove, but I'll let that argument alone for now. However, I've also heard it said over and over that you can't do that in
any stove, that the green stuff will just sit there and smolder and fill the flue with massive amounts of creosote, that this is why the EPA stoves were developed in the first place... yada, yada, yada.
BTW there was nothing even vaguely "scientific" about this photo. Just some very green wood, a scale, a match, a stove, and a camera. Strictly observations. No hypotheses, no doctoring of temps or other data, no Photoshopping (hell, I still have that annoying looking "face" showing in the flames). The proof is in the puddin' here as well AFAIC, ain't it? But no one will ever believe it because it seems to violate every concept they have ever heard about burning wood. It doesn't, however, violate anything the woodburning technologists are saying.
Me, I'll continue to trust meters, and sensors, and scientists, and engineers, and wood technology, and good common sense at the end of the day... and leave everybody else's anecdotal proof to them. I have a hard enough time understanding the reasons behind my own observations.