Worth a try anyway. Pick the shortest split you've got that has no knots in it. Sit down not too low, stand the split on one end, give the hatchet a little whack so it just sticks in the top end of the split. Then if you're me, switch hands so the hammer is in your dominant hand and your non-dominant hand is holding the hatchet handle and whang the hammer down on the top of the hatchet. (It helps if you can press the hatchet down against the wood by the handle as you do this.) It'll take a few blows, but with a straight-grained not too dense wood like red oak or ash or even rock maple that's not too thick, you should be able to get it to split apart. Red Oak is generally easy-peasey to split without too much effort.
It was a different brand that I tried, but they burn like the dickens, so definitely start small with those until you get a feel for how they burn. I dunno if you ever want to burn a big load of bricks. The mfrs say that the bricks are twice as dense as hardwood. . .or somesuch, so in theory, bricks could allow you to load the stove with 2x the BTU's it was meant to burn.
Love the lil Woodeze, but it's kind of overkill if all he needs to do is split a split once in a while to see what the moisture reading is. ;-}
I sympathize on the wood storage. I'm way out in the country where wood-burning is the norm, but I also have almost no flat areas on my property and after several years of trying have essentially given up on buying green wood and stacking it out to dry for a few years. I don't mind stacking a few cords of wood, but not when I have to do it over and over and over again because the stacks fall over repeatedly with the uneven heaving and sinking of the earth underneath them over the seasons.
Dave, if you were measuring the moisture without splitting the wood and measuring on the interior, all your moisture meter was picking up was the slight change in moisture on the outer 10th of an inch or so. That does change, for instance, when it gets rained on for a day or so. But it dries out again almost immediately. I suppose it's possible your green wood is outgassing onto the very outermost layer of the dry wood, but it just plain physically can't go any farther than that. Bring a couple pieces of that "poisoned" dry wood inside next to the stove for a couple hours and measure them again on the outside.
Parallel to the grain. If you're holding the piece parallel to the floor the long way, the probes go left/right.
Very rare to find that kind of wood supplier, no matter what they say about their "seasoned wood." It's just not practical for the vast majority of wood suppliers to keep vast numbers of cords of wood of various lengths stacked for years on their property. I've seen and heard of one or two, but it's not common and they charge a lot more for the wood.
Well, before you give up on the idea, doublecheck what counts as a "structure" and see if you can go through the records and find somebody else who did a woodshed. I would think a nicely done woodshed would add to, rather than detract from, the "historic" nature of the neighborhood.
