Downed Oak Firewood Moisture - 2 Months In

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About a week ago, I shared the latest look at our firewood consumption and included a photo of the small pile of Oak firewood that I've gathered from our yard.  Back in late October of 2019, we had a snow storm that arrived while most of our trees still had all of their leaves on the limbs.  That caused some snow-related damage in the neighborhood and we had a significant limb come down on one of the two large Oak trees in our backyard.  By my count, there were 27 or more rings on the limb, so this thing had been growing for more than a quarter century.

In Mid-November, I posted another set of images that included some of the (then) cut up/processed pieces and talked about measuring the moisture in the Oak over time.  At that moment (November 18th), the piece was showing a moisture reading of: 24.5%.  I set that piece aside and am using it for this post today.  I remeasured the moisture content.  On the 'exposed side', where I first measured, and it has dropped almost 3% of moisture.  More than 10% overall drop.  Now....that's on the 'exposed' side and if I was to take my axe and split this piece open, I'm thinking the moisture content would be higher (and more accurate), but as a way to measure moisture content over time here on the blog, I'm going to just measure in this same spot.

As a reminder, the experts say that the moisture content should be under 20% for seasoned firewood.  And, since this is measuring so close to that benchmark, I know that it isn't *quite* accurate, but as I mentioned;  it is how I'm going to measure this pile of Oak.

Downed Oak Firewood Seasoning Timeline:

 November 18, 2019 (baseline):  24.5%
January 24, 2020 (2 months later):  21.7%

Location: Downers Grove, IL, USA

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