Fire Wood Season '25 Lookback

      As the woodburning season comes to a close it is worth noting the wins we had and the things we want to do better for next season. This was a fairly eventful season. It was both very cold and very snowy. We could have gone through a lot more wood. We also got caught shorthanded and definitely did not have enough wood for the season. Add in travel and a new dog, there was a lot going on.

 WINS:

•       Wood Splitting We got so much better at splitting wood this year. This was the biggest win and helped fuel (pun intended) much of our other wins. We had a thing we bought to help split wood. It was a round device with a wedge in it and you hit the wood with a sledge hammer. It worked ok, but it was not what we needed. It limited the size of wood you could split, which meant bigger pieces were not getting split properly. We bought a proper Fiskars splitter, watched a few videos, and went to town. Boy did this change things. Getting wood became fun. We’d take a bag load, walk over to where we would split wood and wail away at it. So much fun! Go split wood sometime! It is a great stress reliever and hearing that crack is so fulfilling. Big story split smaller, splitting the wood better gave us better kindling, smaller pieces of wood and that got us making hotter fires. MUCH hotter fires. Fires were also lighting faster and easier. Everything got better.

•       Digging Out Turns out that digging out the wood was not that bad. Once the puppy came home, we had more reason to be in the backyard so letting a dog run around and digging out wood worked well together. I’m not going to let this happen again, but it won’t be as big a hinderance as it was this year.

•       Letting Wood Sit On top of the wood that is still buried, the wood that was not ready to burn was left to sit. So the wood that will be moved to the convenience store will be ready for next winter. It was green and uncovered so it did not dry as much as needed. That’s ok. It will get moved and be great when we need it come November. I’m starting the build up to next season already and this is good. I have plans, but getting the wood is the biggest part of those plans. Storing them is another issue, but we’ll get that taken care of.

•       Hotter Building hotter fires has been it’s own game changer. The glass on our stove has barely needed to be cleaned. Hotter fires means less creosote buildup. Which means a safer chimney. Plus getting the fire hot is the goal.

•       Faster Wow did the smaller pieces help us light the fire faster and get it hot faster. It should make sense, smaller logs give you a larger overall surface area. Take one big log and split into 4 pieces and the surface area is a lot larger than it was. The fna kicks in much sooner than it did and it is just nice not having to babysit a fire while getting it up to temp. Making this process faster has made fires more enjoyable.

•       Kindling This was the surprising one. Splitting wood is messy work. Each piece of wood is like string cheese and breaks a part (peels) in unexpected ways. On top of this, you sometimes don’t hit the wood squarely or hard enough. So there is a lot of small pieces that happen. These pieces have changed our kindling game. We used to use the splitting tool thing I described earlier to make as small pieces as possible. Basically trying to recreate fatwood. Now we just take what the wood gives us. The bucket of scraps serves our needs to so well. If we leave the house or let the fire die down, we can throw some the scraps right onto the coals and the fire kicks right back up.

Improvemens:

•       Not Enough Wood This summer had a lot happening and I was working a lot more than I had been so we were not ready for the season. We basically had a 1 1/3 cords of wood and we really need 2 full cords. This was a colder than normal winter so we could have used 3 full cords. I just did not get enough wood and everytime I went to get some supplemental kiln dried wood things got in the way. There was also a ton of snow, leaving us no later in the season spot to put a pallet of wood. And when there was we were traveling or otherwise too busy to make it happen.

  • A Neighbor’s unused stash of wood has been identified and I will reach out to see if we can work our a deal for it. othewise…

  • I’ll buy more wood and..

  • track down a tree service company or two to get some rounds for us to practice real splitting.

  • The goal is 2-3 cords.

•       Inconvenient We have two smaller racks by the back stairs to our deck that we jokingly refer to as The Convince Store. The wood there is easiest to get to and is there for cold, wet, or lazy days. I never filled these racks. Part of this ties into the not enough wood, but it was still not a wise move and plans are in place to fix it with the wood that was not ready for this year.

•       Snow The end of the big wood rack got snowed in and the last few days of wood to be burned stay buried until it melted. There was a cover, so what I could dig out burned just fine. I just left some wood on the table for next season. It will be added to the convenience store. But I wanted that wood for this winter and left it unavailable to myself. I have to be willing to dig it out or move it before it snows.

•       Storage We just do not have the storage capacity for the amount of wood we burn. I have to fix this. The two plans are

  • Build the pallet system I saw on youtube. It’s a 4×4 grid of pallets, with a fifth pallet in the middle to help ensure airflow. Then the perimeter is pallets wired together to make a bin that holds 1 full cord of unstacked wood. This bin will get green wood that will sit for a full year.

  • Buy/build a wood shed to sit next to the driveway. This should hold 2 chords and that was we can alternate wood. One year we pull from the front the next the back. This means all wood would be properly seasoned.

      Firewood is such a labor intensive form of heating. While I won’t get into the environmental aspects of it, it really boils down to where your wood comes from if it’s sustainable, but it is cheaper and better than Natural Gas (Methane!) was this winter. And from the looks of the world, it’s going to be cheaper next year too. So until we are able to de-methanize the house, the wood burning stove will be the main heat source.

      The effort is half of the fun. There is so much to learn and so many skills to get better at. We’ve come so far in the few years since we embarked on this journey. It is not life or death for us so we were able to make the, non-life threatening, mistakes and improve. The last fire of the year is roaring right now and my hope is to the cats and the dog sitting in front of the fireplace next winter. Loving the heat and coziness of it.