The Art and Science of Firewood.... a very short story

3 days ago

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Well, Winter has come and frankly it's been hitting us here in Windsor and Lasalle for the better part of 3 months now. I remember working in snow in early November- just around the time we got back from climbing in the Gorge. We were doing a big maple removal in Colchester, and the wind and ice pellets and snow...

We're at the half-way point with this years firewood. We're dealing with a small bit of cottonwood, before diving into some awesome mulberry and oak. Next year, I will intentionally divide cooler woods (like cottonwood, soft maple) from the more thermally dense hardwoods.

Yeesh, it's always early in the season, before our bodies (and fingers) have adapted to the discomfort. We get screaming barfies in our hands, and everything is numb, and because of being overdressed we are cold, then we are sweaty, then clammy, and lastly chilled.

But, there is nothing quite like coming back to a wood fire. Wood stoves are one of the great luxuries of being Canadian, and by luxury I mean experiential luxury, not comfort or ease. After all the wood must be split, and stacked, and dried. This is all done in the Winter prior to the Winter you'll need it, so it takes a bit of planning and a bit of discipline.

The best time to split wood is during the coldest days of the winter before. The best way to split wood - especially large rounds of urban harvested removals - is with a hydraulic splitter. That is where we start. We buck the rounds into 14-16" length or so while still on the job, and then bring them home. We use the hydraulic splitter to process them into quarters, and then finish them with splitting mauls to save time.

We like to dry out the nights wood in front of the fireplace. It's probably a firehazard, but...

One of the problem with a lot of firewood suppliers is the sheer size of the processed wood. If you quarter an 18" round, for example, the resulting firewood is still too big to dry properly, and certainly too big to dry in a year. That's what the maul is for. We split it again, so that the firewood is only about 2-3 inches across measured diagonally. This is then loose stacked in rows- to let the sun and rain and wind season it. Finally, we fill the wood shed in the fall. Our wood shed holds about 5 bush cords (or 15 face cords) and we will use most of that during the Winter.

We have removed the furnace at the house, and heat most of the house (albeit unevenly) with the fireplace. This is a temporary measure until the Spring when we install a wood stove in the old house, and that will provide us completely reliable, weather and grid independent deep heat.