Posts Tagged firewood
Making Firewood
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Homesteading, Uncategorized on March 4th, 2010
This is the first two truck-loads of firewood that I brought home. The stuff sitting on the ground, not the stacked stuff. Well, it ain’t firewood in the picture, but it is by now.
Notice the difference in the height of the right-hand stack? That’s what used to be that wood. I estimate it’s about a rick, which is about $65 in the bank by my math, or about $50 if you take into account that I picked it up vs. having it delivered. I focus on the money, because it’s obvious, but there’s no price I would put on the idea that I’m providing for myself a fundamental and life-sustaining need (heat, during the winter).
Splitting wood is fun, which is an odd thing to say given how much work it is. My hands and arms have been very tired from swinging the maul, and my back and legs are tired from moving the big hunks of stump after I cut them off the log with the chainsaw. Still, hitting a solid chunk of wood with a12-lb piece of metal and having the wood split into two pieces and go flying has a certain visceral pleasure. KA-POW! It’s kind of like working a heavy punching bag, but with a fire at the end.
The neighbor has offered to let me borrow his gas-powered splitter, but I’m not interested. I have enough things in my life that a gasoline engine turns into nothing harder than a button push. I’m happy to have something so valuable come out of nothing more than a stick, a piece of heavy metal, and my body. That’s not to say that I’m not also happy to have a riding mower for the field, or a gas tiller (that thing was a damn life-saver; I can’t imagine doing all that work by hand), just that here’s one thing I can do by hand, and I like doing it, and there’s no need to turn it over to Almighty Petroleum just because I can.
Currently, we have at least 3 cords stored up, but some of that is going to be burned on what’s left of this winter. I estimate we may need about 5 cords to get through a year, so I’ve got a lot more work to do before I’m “done.” The truth is that I may never be “done,” because it’d be fantastic to have at least two years’ worth saved up. One year is the absolute minimum for seasoning hard-wood, but two years is usually better.
And, even if I had two years saved up, seeing good wood rotting on the ground just looks like a waste to me now. But of course, that’s not true either. Bugs live in the wood and eat it. The wood itself rots and turns into soil. I suppose if I gathered up enough firewood, eventually the soil in the woods would be less fertile, but I doubt that little-ol’-me is making that much of a difference. If everyone in Knox county heated their homes with wood, then we might have to worry about how many trees were getting cut, but as-is, I can pretty much heat my entire house for a year on what other people would just leave lying on the ground. It’s nice to be in a situation where I can be reasonably confident that my ecological impact is low. Hopefully I can increase the number of those as this homesteading adventure, also know as My Life, continues.
Wood: Cords and Pounds
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Homesteading on February 22nd, 2010
The truck has started to pay off. Issa and I have brought home two truck-loads of wood, to become firewood for later. The final amount remains to be seen, because it hasn’t been split yet, but I estimate it to be about 2 “ricks”, or about 2/3 of a cord. For perspective, we were paying about $65 a rick for seasoned, ready-to-burn wood, delivered but not stacked. Since we paid about $6,000 for the truck, I figure that means the truck is two-100ths of the way towards paying for itself.
I’d like to take a minute here and express my frustration with non-specific units of measurement. See, a cord of wood is exactly 128 cubic feet of wood. You can give it to me in a 4×4x8 stack, or a 4×2x16 stack, or whatever combination you please, but a cord is a cord. But people never seem to sell wood by the cord. Instead, they sell by the “rick,” at least that’s what they call it here in Tennessee.
A rick is a 4×8 stack. Notice any missing dimensions? That’s right. A rick is 4 by 8 by whatever length the wood is cut to. So a person who cuts the wood to 18″ is giving you a heck of a lot more wood than someone who cuts to more like 14″. And you never know until they deliver the wood, which makes it damn near impossible to comparison shop, which is, in my opinion, why people like to sell by the rick.
I guess in the long run, it probably works out, because most people cut to about the same length, but the engineer in me just hates the lack of precision.
Anyway, the bed of the truck is about 45 cubic feet. A cord of wood is exactly 128 cubic feet, and a rick usually works out to about 1/3 of a cord, or about 42 cubic feet. So the bed of the truck is, conveniently, almost exactly one rick. Ain’t that handy.
I found a place near my house where some trees had been felled for a construction project. They were cut into 2′-4′ long pieces, and laying on the ground. Some of them had already been run through the chipper, so I felt pretty confident nobody would mind me taking them. Issa and I finished filling up the bed of the truck, and she said, “Do you think we’re over the truck’s weight rating?” Well, I hadn’t much thought of it until that very moment.
It turns out, we have a truck stop near our house, so for about $10, we could have figured out exactly what we weighed. Keep this tip in mind if you own a truck and/or a trailer, because you can overload those things really easy and not know it. You don’t have to be a semi to go through the scales. But since I didn’t think of that, we just drove home real slow and tossed the wood off on the ground.
But we’re not the first to have this kind of question, and I found this nifty little booklet that contains a table of nominal weights for a cord of various types of wood. The heaviest type of wood is oak, at up to 5500 lbs per cord of green wood. Which means that if we were to pack our truck bed full of oak, it would weigh about 1900 lbs. I think our truck’s payload capacity is about 1700 lbs, so I guess we might have been over-weight, but not by much.
Wallow Update
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Homesteading on January 29th, 2010
Woodpeckers are not eating the house anymore. I think the mylar worked. It certainly works on me. I hear it or see it moving out of the corner of my eye and wonder what it is for just a second.
Bought a whole cord of “seasoned” wood. Note to seller: just because a tree has been dead for a while doesn’t mean it’s “seasoned.” You have to split it and THEN let it sit for a year or so. Next time I’ll know.
That wood on the right? That’s seasoned wood. The ends get all dark and weathered. So does the rest of it. That lovely-smelling, clean stuff on the left? Not seasoned. Kind of night-and-day, you know? Like I said, I’ll know better next time.
Aww yeah. That’s the good stuff.
Warm. Good.
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