Why I Oughta...

September is firewood-figurin' season around here.  It is the time when I typically place our seasonal order for firewood for the Winter.  I went out to look at how things were shaping up (currently) and then I figured I'd wander through the archives to see what history tells me.  Lets start where we were a year ago and where we are today. A little bit under a year ago - pre-order - the racks looked like this . The two outdoor - side-of-garage racks were empty, the rack on the top of the stoop by my office was empty.  And the inside-the-screened-porch racks were mixed (small one half-full, large one was full on bottom and half-full on top).   I ordered 3 Facecords in September of 2022 .  Oak, Cherry and Hickory.  We used a lot of wood last year - here's January's status .   Today, here's what those racks look like:  The two outdoor side-of-garage racks have been emptied of the kiln-dried wood.  The stoop rack is empty, too....

Back in last October (2022), we had the large Norway Maple tree taken down in our front yard.  The guys who removed the tree chip'd a bunch of the smaller stuff and then hauled all of the larger material back to the far reaches our yard .  I had them put as much of it on the rack that I had back there to begin to dry out.   You can see what the original pile of rounds looked like in this post if you scroll all the way down to the bottom.   Almost as soon as the tree was taken down, I began to split some of the rounds .  Here's a post from November showing some of that work .   I was curious about the moisture content and how long Norway Maple would take to season - as some online suggest it is 'fast'.   By December, I had blown through most of the kiln-dried firewood that I had delivered, so that free'd up the racks by the side of our house.  I decided to move some of the recently-split Maple firewood up there .   N...

The last time that I ran a [ firewood consumption ] check-in for this season was seven weeks ago on December 1st .  At that time - which was 60 days into the burning season - we had emptied the smaller sideyard rack (and replaced it with Norway Maple) and had burned about 1/3rd of the larger one.  The two inside racks were - at that time - mostly full. I consider the burning season to be 5 months long - about 150 days.  October, Nov Dec = 90 days.  Jan, Feb = 60 days.  Total of 150 ending on March 1st.   Where are we today?  115 days out of 150 = 76% thru the season. The most-recent comparison is from this past February when I had quite a bit of wood left.  See this post .  At that point, the two inside racks were full (just like now), the stoop rack was full and there was a pile inside the garage.   Let's look at the racks as they stand today.  First...the two inside racks are, indeed full.  No photos of those. ...

In October, I began to split all the Norway Maple wood that came from the mature tree that we took down in our front yard .  The crew that took the tree down processed the trunk and major limbs into rounds of various lengths and put them up on a rack in the far back of our property.   That work continued in November and December.   In November, I decided to begin to attack some of the large pieces with a splitting wedge to get some smaller pieces that I could split with my axe and that's been really helpful in getting some of the larger pieces processed.  I've used the fact that some of the wood is just sitting on the ground as a sort-of forcing function to compel me to split those pieces first.  They're the largest ones because I couldn't lift them up on the rack due to their weight.  By November 11th, I noted that some of the freshly-split Norway Maple was *VERY* high in moisture with a reading of 50% moisture .  But, a month later, it was ...

We're now in the thick of things firewood-wise.  The burning will only increase in both frequency and length of sessions as we head towards the heart of Winter and the holiday season when we're hanging around the house more and more.  So, where do we stand?   Today marks the two-month mark.  Our firewood was delivered on September 30th, so that means we've burned through 60 days of wood.  With 90 days to go (that gets us to March 1st).  We had three facecords delivered on September 30th .  And, at that time all of the racks were empty but for the bottom of the porch rack and about 15 pieces on top of that.  What does it look like today?   The porch racks are full (mostly).  See below for the short one, followed by the double.  Note the wood on top of the double.  I'm claiming that's an equivalent amount that was remaining this Spring.   Outside, the smaller of the two racks has been exhausted.  The larg...

The last time that I did a Firewood check for the diary was back when we had our Fall delivery in October of 2021 .  That was three full facecords - one Cherry, one Birch and one 'Super Mix' (a combo of Oak and Hickory).  We're now four full months later in terms of burning season and it was time to note where we stood in terms of tracking how much is left and whether we need to reorder.   Looking back at that October post , it seems that I started the season with the 'inside racks' being mostly full.  That meant that I filled up the two outdoor racks, the stoop rack (plus a side pile) and a stand-alone stack in the garage.   Where are we standing today?  The outdoor racks have been basically exhausted.  My strategy was to pull from these racks early in the season - while the weather was nice and we didn't have a lot of snow on the ground.  As things got colder and there was snow, I'd move to the stoop and garage racks.  That worked...