Why I Oughta...

I might have jumped the gun.  With what, you ask?  The moisture reading on the recently split Norway Maple firewood.  As a reminder, we had a very large Norway Maple (that was in a bad state of decline) removed from our front yard this Fall .  I had the wood processed into rounds and brought to the back of our property to begin to dry out.  By the end of October, I started to split the rounds .  And they were HEAVY and wet.  (or....as they say in the firewood business:  'green').  I wanted to track how fast this Norway Maple firewood would dry out and become 'seasoned' enough to be able to burn.  The pros say that you need to get the moisture level down below 20% to be dry-enough to burn properly.  F rom the time that I began to split the wood to 18 days later (2.5 weeks), I was reading the moisture level to be 50% .   Now...if you read any of the firewood online forums, you'll see that A LOT of people claim that Norway Maple (or...some folks call it Box Elder wood)

A few days ago, I posted some photos and an update on my annual firewood consumption and speculated that I was moving faster than I needed to (in terms of burning) and that without some intervention, I would likely consume my entire stockpile of firewood before the end of the burning season - March 1st, 2023.  In that post , I talked about how I might extend my supply by cutting in some of the recently-split Norway Maple firewood from the large tree in our front yard that we took down.   It was just a couple of weeks ago that one of my fresh, just recently-split pieces of Norway Maple was registering 50% on my moisture meter .  Norway Maple has a reputation of being VERY fast drying and gets down to sub-20% moisture very quickly.  But, how quickly?   Here's what the moisture meter is showing on a few different pieces of this same Norway Maple firewood after just 2+ weeks: What the what?  13 and 14 percent?  Anything under 20 is ready to be burned.  So, does that mean I can start t

I mentioned that I started to split some of the Norway Maple tree firewood that resulting from the removal of the large tree in our front yard.  In a post a couple weeks ago, I talked about how I've started to split some of the larger rounds with my axe.  I've taken a slow-but-steady approach to the project and will continue to split this wood over the next few months.  The first splits resulted in pieces that I am putting up on a rack to season for the year.  I did, however, want to begin to track the moisture content of this freshly cut, green wood.  Here, below, is a photo of my moisture meter showing 50% moisture in this piece:  The moisture level that split, dry firewood needs to get to in order to be considered 'seasoned' is below 20% - so we have a long way to go.  Norway Maple is known for 'drying quickly' , so I'll test this theory by trying to track these freshly split pieces in the coming weeks/months.  Will it be ready this season?  I doubt it,

A color/aging check-in on the Ash Firewood that I acquired last year.  I still haven't split all of the rounds, but with the social distancing experience going on, we're going to have some good backyard time in the next week or two.  I first covered this wood - when it was standing as a (dead) Ash tree last year in November .  The full archive of ash firewood posts are here .   I had the rounds dropped over the fence late last year .  And started splitting and stacking it right after Christmas .  Head there to that post and see the color. There's been a change and I think darkening of the wood since this was first split.  I know that I kind of have a 'golden hour' thing going on in the photo at the top of this post.  But, to my eye: it seems to have aged/seasoned. I haven't put a moisture meter to any of this stuff yet, but it seems that I should be tracking it going forward.  I've actually brought in some of this wood and have burned it at night -

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 alm