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How to Select Firewood.
Firewood is an area where you can have great influence over how well your system performs and how enjoyable your experience will be. Quality, well-seasoned firewood will help your wood stove or fireplace burn cleaner and more efficiently, while green or wet wood can cause smoking problems, odour problems, rapid creosote build-up and possibly even dangerous chimney fires.
A few minutes spent understanding firewood will be time well spent, so please read on for general background information, as well as how to buy wood and store wood.
Seasoned Wood
All firewood contains water. Freshly cut wood can be up to 45% moisture! while well-seasoned firewood generally has a 20-25% moisture content. Well-seasoned firewood is easier to start, produces more heat, and burns cleaner. The important thing to remember is that the water must be gone before the wood will burn. If your wood is cut 6 months to a year in advance and properly stored, the sun and wind will do the job for free. If you try to burn green wood, the heat produced by combustion must dry the wood before it will burn, using up a large percentage of the available energy in the process. This results in less heat delivered to your home, and literally gallons of acidic water in the form of creosote deposited in your chimney.
Wood is composed of bundles of microscopic tubes that were used to transport water from the roots of the tree to the leaves. These tubes will stay full of water for years even after a tree is dead. This is why it is so important to have your firewood cut to length for 6 months or more before you burn it, it gives this water a chance to evaporate since the tube ends are finally open and the water only must migrate a foot or two to escape. Splitting the wood helps too by exposing more surface area to the sun and wind, but cutting the wood to shorter lengths is of primary importance.
There are a few things you can look for to see if the wood you intend to purchase is seasoned or not. Well-seasoned firewood generally has darkened ends with cracks or splits visible, it is relatively lightweight, and makes a clear “clunk” when two pieces are beat together. Green wood on the other hand is very heavy, the ends look fresher, and it tends to make a dull “thud” when struck. These clues can fool you however, and by far the best way to be sure you have good wood when you need it is to buy your wood the spring before you intend to burn it and store it properly.
Storing Firewood
Even well-seasoned firewood can be ruined by bad storage. Exposed to constant rain or covered in snow, wood will reabsorb large amounts of water, making it unfit to burn and causing it to rot before it can be used. Wood should be stored off the ground if possible and protected from excess moisture when weather threatens.
The ideal situation is a woodshed, where there is a roof but open or loose sides for plenty of air circulation to promote drying. Next best would be to keep the wood pile in a sunny location and cover it on rainy or snowy days, being sure to remove the covering during fair weather to allow air movement and to avoid trapping ground moisture under the covering. Also don’t forget that your woodpile also looks like heaven to termites, so it’s best to only keep a week or so worth of wood near the house in easy reach. With proper storage you can turn even the greenest wood into great firewood in 6 months or a year, and it can be expected to last 3 or 4 years if necessary.
Buying Firewood
Firewood is generally sold by volume, truck load or per 1000 pieces.
Another thought concerning getting what you pay for is that although firewood is usually sold by volume, heat production is dependent on weight. Kilogram for kilogram, all wood has approximately the same Kilowatt content, but 1000 pieces of seasoned hardwood weighs about twice as much as the same volume of softwood, and consequently contains almost twice as much potential heat. If the wood you are buying is not all hardwood, consider offering a little less in payment.
Top Firewood Tips.
It is far more important that the fuel be dry as compared to the species.
Do not burn any construction scraps of treated or painted wood, especially treated wood from decks or landscaping ties. The chemicals used can release dangerous amounts of arsenic and other very toxic compounds into your house.
If the “seasoned wood” you bought turned out to be pretty green and you elected to try to burn it anyway, be sure to have the chimney checked more often than usual, you may build up creosote very quickly. You don’t have to burn only premium hardwoods. Less dense woods like elm and even soft maple are abundant and make fine firewood if you’re willing to make a few extra trips to the woodpile.
If you have access to a variety of species, learn to manage your woodpile. Save the denser fuel for the coldest months and use the “lighter” wood for kindling fires and during the spring or fall when you don’t need as much heat.
Many people also have questions about burning artificial logs. Convenience is their strong suit and in general they are fine when time is an issue, and you want a quick fire without all the muss and fuss of natural firewood. Usually, they should be burned only one at a time and only in an open fireplace. One should be careful about poking them and moving them around once they are burning since they may break up and the fire may get a bit out of control. Be sure to carefully read the directions on the package.
Why braais stink the next day after a fire or braai.
Braais do not stink or smell the next day, if they do, then something is wrong.
It’s a fact that you can leave the ash in the braai, and it will not smell the next day. If you are getting a smell, it’s 99% the smell of the soot in the chimney and then something is wrong. If you smell the fat of the braai grid, it can be downdraft, cross draft, or a combination of the two.
1.This could be that you are getting some down draft after the braai cooled down and the downdraft is stronger than the natural up-draft.
2. The other situation does happen occasionally when you have very tightly sealed windows and doors. While your braai, two things happen. The room heats up with the fire and the chimney sucks the air from the room. With the heat in the room, the air expands and is very easily sucked out the chimney. When the braai body and air has cooled enough, the room needs air to refill the volume. With your nice and tight doors and windows, there is no other place than to get the air through the place of least resistance and that’s the chimney. All the air coming through the chimney brings that stinky fire smell into the room. You can test it by leaving a window open in that room and the next day you will not have the smell because the chimney did not down draft. If you still have the smell in the morning, then you probably have a chimney that is too low and causing this down draft or reverse flow of the chimney.
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