After my last post, I got to thinking, and I whipped up this handy little spreadsheet to calculate how much cord-wood you would get from a log of a given diameter and length. This can be printed out and taken with one when one is sizing up logs to buy, or if one just wants an idea of how much wood is coming home on the trailer.
To use the table, find the row that corresponds to the log’s diameter in inches and cross-reference it with the column that corresponds to the log’s length in feet. The number in the cell is the amount of cord-wood that will result from bucking and splitting the log. So, for example, a log 20″ in diameter and 10′ long would produce 0.31 cord of wood.
Remember that a cord of wood is a pure volume measurement, so it does not take density into account. A stacked cord of wood may have more or less actual wood in it depending on how tightly it’s stacked. The table assumes 70 cubic feet of wood per cord, which is on the low end, so it will be more likely to produce over-estimates than under-estimates. If you download the actual spreadsheet, you will see that I have put in an entry below the table that you can modify to change the assumed density of the cord.
A density of 70 to 90 cubic feet of wood per cord is suggested by the Internet.
You can download the relevant files here:
- Cord Wood Calculator (Adobe Acrobat / .PDF)
- Cord Wood Calculator (Excel Spreadsheet / .XLSX)
