Some Notes on Splitting Wood

I've posted notes here before about firewood. Buying, stacking, burning. About wood pellets. Buying, stacking, burning. But I think I haven't given much time to splitting of wood. The old saw about firewood is that it burns twice: once, when you cut, split, and stack it - and again, when you burn it.

Back around Halloween 2011, we received a surprise snow storm. Now we realize that it was to be just about the only snow we'd see even during the winter. This storm would have had a much different effect if it came a few weeks later when the leaves would have fallen off the deciduous trees. In my neighborhood the significant trees are tall straight oaks which unfortunately still had leaves. The snow caused loud pops and cracks while limbs fell under the weight of the snow clinging to the leaves and the branches. You can see in the photo below what things looked like the next day. For us, there was little damage. Many branches were down - oh and we had no electrical power for a week. But fortunately for us, we did have town water, town sewer, and a wood stove - and two chainsaws in questionable condition.

Which brings me back to wood. In the weeks after the storm, my neighbors had some damaged trees taken down. Fortunately for me, they offered me the firewood. Fortunately for them, they didn't have to pay to have the wood carted off. I've split wood before, but not that much. And this was a lot of wood. I've split probably two cords of it and there is more to go. Good thing I built that wood shelter just before the storm.

In order to split wood, you need a tool called a maul. Not this kind of maul. A maul looks like a big axe. Like something the tin woodman would carry, but a little too heavy to be a good movie prop. It is basically a heavy metal wedge on the end of a handle. The blade is blunt, because it doesn't cut wood. When you lift it over your head and swing it down, it bends and stresses the wood, so whack the end of a log the wood splits. 

I use the maul below, which I inherited from my brother. It's a 5 lb. maul with a fiberglass handle. After my first week of serious splitting, the maul literally flew off the handle because it loosened up and because the epoxy holding it cracked after I used the back of the maul as a sledge hammer. The latter was a bad idea. A maul is not a sledge hammer. After a little web research, I learned that you could reattach a fiberglass handle with over-the-counter hardware-store epoxy. It took about two of those epoxy syringes worth to fill the gap. After a few days of curing, it was ready. This saved me from buying a new maul, a new handle, or a repair kit.

Besides a maul, you need goggles for eye protection, gloves for hand and mostly skin protection, a thick belt for lower-back protection, and good sturdy shoes. When I shot the photos below, I got lazy for a moment switching from holding the maul to removing my gloves to hold the camera. After two whacks with the maul, I instantly had a blister. I wear glasses and goggles, but I still get an occasional small chip of wood hit me near my eyes.

Splitting wood is quite rewarding. And if you are lucky, you will have wood that is straight without knots or branches. If you are really lucky, it will have a nice hairline crack (see photo below) started on it's own. It develops that kind of crack from the stress of being cut and from some drying that occurs by the time you get to split it. This wood was cut about 3 months ago. It split nicely when it was brand new and still splits well. It split well while frozen and while warmer.

Splitting wood requires some patience and mindfulness. I was near the end of a run when I took this series of photos, so I was paying less attention. You can see the the first hit with the Maul completely missed the natural crack.

The next whack, hit the crack and split the log. This log is about 17 inches tall and about the same in diameter. Fortunately for me most of the logs were cut to about 18 inches which is just right for fitting into our wood stove.

It is important to pay attention, to be mindful, and to never split wood if you are tired.
If I was paying attention, I would have cleaved the log on the first whack, but I did so on the third attempt. This is one of the most rewarding things about splitting wood. You hit this massive log that weighs perhaps 60 pounds and of course took years to grow and with a swing of a 5 lb. maul and a loud crack it splits.

Once you split it in half, splitting the rest is easy as pie, but don't forget to pay attention.

Fresh split oak has that cheesy smell just like sour milk on a baby's breath. You probably think I'm kidding, but it does.

Pyromania Update - Strike!

First the Wood Pile:

I must confess now. Last week I was visiting my glorious wood pile, and I noticed that it was listing to one side. It was leaning a bit toward the house. I nudged it. It wiggled. I nudged it again. It wiggled some more. I decided to tie a rope around it and secure it to our deck. I nudged it again. It wobbled. I gave it a shove from the safer side, away from where it was leaning, and down it came. It sounded like pins in a bowling alley. So I was quite thankful that I was the one to discover the problem and that nobody else was around to be surprised by it.

Today I restacked it. A little better, but still not perfect. A little shorter, which will make my wife happy, but shorter mainly because we actually burned some wood.

Now, moving onto pellet stove news:

We did have a recent adventure here at the house. We returned from being away for Thanksgiving to find that our gas furnace had been off for 3 days. It seems that every so often, it would try to start up, but didn't. As it was early evening, we turned on the pellet stoves, moved bedding to the family room, tried to find the source of the problem, and find a heating guy to fix it. We had a toasty time camping out in the family room, but the house which started at 47 degrees inside when we got home was not very hospitable. The pellet stove eventually got it up to 58 degrees. This was with the stove on maximum. By morning the stove had burned up all it's fuel.

BTW, the furnace needed a new ignition element - the thing that lights the gas. The old one had burned out. The gas company had said they couldn't come check it out for at least a week! (Good thing I'm able bodied.) The local repairman, referred to me by my neighbor, came the next day, fixed it, and said he'd send a bill, which I expect won't be very big.

Fire In the hole

This is a shot of one of our pellet stoves aflame. When the room is cold, it is cozy to sit in front of the stove and enjoy the glow and the radiant heat. The front of the stove, the glass, and the stove pipe are hot, but unlike a wood stove, the rest of it is cool. When the stove is on low, the stove pipe is actually warm - and not hot - because of the high efficiency. Every few seconds, the pellets drop down a chute making a quaint little plinking sound when they land in the little metal box. The only other sounds I hear is the faint roar from the fire, the turn of the auger which delivers the pellets, and blower.

In case you were wondering, this is a Travis pellet stove (Lopi - Heritage Bay). The stove has a switch which can be manual, automatic, or off. Manual means you hit another button to start it, and it will keep running. Automatic means if you hook up an external room thermostat, then it will cycle on and off like any heating device depending upon the room temperature. It also has two knobs one is oddly labeled 'Heat Output' which really means 'heat level' or really 'feed rate of pellets'. If I turn this up to max, then fuel (the pellets) will be fed more frequently into the fire box. The other one reads 'Fan' and this is actually the 'Heat Output' since when the fan is set to high, the stove will output heat (blow hot air) faster.

As promised, I hooked a thermostat to the pellet stove. Just about any thermostat available from your local hardware store will do. I bought some telephone wire and 1/4 inch contacts to hook it up. I even get a rebate from my gas company, because I bought an EnergyStar compliant thermostat which will let me program it. For example, I can set it to heat the room up more in the morning and less at night.

BTW, I'm told that my pellet stove can even burn a mixture of up to 10% corn kernels. I wonder if occasionally some will pop!

Pallets of Pellets

We can't figure out exactly how to heat our house. Our house can be heated with forced-air gas heat, electric (in one big room), wood (fireplace in living room), or pellets. As I noted on a previous entry, when faced with too many choices, we humans may not make any choices at all, and ultimately we may feel bad about those we do make. For heating our house, it's too early to tell.

Our home came with 2 pellet stoves. There is one upstairs and one downstairs. The downstairs one is an insert - it lives within the fireplace; the other is free-standing.





Pellet stoves are like wood stoves in appearance and general function - they burn wood to heat homes, but pellet stoves are more modern. They have a button to turn them on, have knobs and switches to adjust their settings, and an electric fan to blow the heat. They run on wood pellets which are fed by a motor into a little firebox to be burned at a regular rate. Because the fuel of the stove is standardized, pellet stoves run automatically and can burn more efficiently than wood stoves or other means of heating. They also have remarkably low amount of emissions.

But pellets don't grown on trees, you know. They have to be manufactured and ordered. Just as wood for heating has to be felled, cut, split, and aged, wood pellets are made from compressed wood waste from sawmills where they are squished into mostly uniform sized pellet resembling rabbit food. The pellets can be poured like grain into sacks which can be easily transported and dumped into the hopper of a pellet stove.



I could give you the hard math here, but I must admit that avoided that myself. I did not want to calculate BTUs and compare fuel prices. I just wanted a rule of thumb to go by. Basically, to heat a generic home you could use a bag of pellets each day. So I figured that I couldn't go wrong if I ordered 150 bags. If I ran out before winter was over, I could just fall back on our gas heat. Late this summer I ordered 3 tons of wood pellets. 3 pallets of pellets. 150 bags of pellets. 6,000 pounds for $750. It took them a month to deliver them.



Once they were left on the driveway, we moved them bag by bag to our secret lair which is an unheated room in our home accessible from only the outside that we simply cannot figure out.



Pellet stoves require some work, although definitely not as much work as wood stoves. We've only been using them a few weeks here, since we only got our first frost a few days ago, so I can't yet rely upon our heating experience.

Some regular tasks for pellet stove owners:

• turning on and off the stove when needed
  
• carrying in pellet bags regularly
  
• refilling the stove daily
  
• cleaning the stove weekly

If you were wondering why we are going through this. It's because pellet stoves are supposed to be a cheap sustainable way to heat your home. They pollute less, and their fuel is wood waste which is a renewable resource. Also our pellet stoves do deliver that glowy warmth and faint smoky aroma that you come to rely on when you burn something. Quite primeval actually, in a modern sort of way.

On my todo list:

• figuring out how to best heat the house using the combination of pellets and gas heat
• adding a thermostat to one of the pellet stoves, so it can go on and off automatically
• attaching a fresh-air intake, so the stove does not suck any heat out of the room
• getting a long brush to clean the stove pipe annually
  

Some links:

• General information about pellet stoves.
• Comparison of wood pellet prices in western Massachusetts.
• My follow-up post about thermostats.
  

Stacking Firewood

A cord of wood is a volume which measures 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. Typically one makes a stack of firewood with split logs about 16" long, so a 6 foot high cord of that would be 16 feet long.

Last night I had our first firewood delivered here for burning. A few calls found someone who would deliver the amount we need. Since it's getting late in the wood season, we want wood that is dry and not green. Dry wood you can burn. They dumped it in the driveway and the pile smells like ... wood. This is more like lifestyle firewood, since we do not have a wood burning stove - we have pellet stoves (more on that another time). We do have a fireplace in which to burn the wood, but it's supposed to be woefully inefficient way of burning wood and actually rumored to draw heat out of a house because of the draft up the chimney. This is rather like the factoid that a person actually uses more calories chewing celery than one gets out of eating the celery. In the case of wood we're talking major Calories, which if you did not know is just energy like heat. I suspect we will indeed get some heat out of it, but mainly we will get warmth - the warm feeling, smell, sound, and light of a winter fire.


I just stacked 3/4 of the wood nice and neatly this morning. I feel like the president on vacation or something... clearing brush, stacking wood. There are a great many ways in which to stack firewood and rules to govern location of a wood pile. Rule of thumb is to stack it far away from your home, off the ground, with a small amount of shelter over it. This sounds like a pain, particularly when one is going for cozy on a cold snowy February day. I chose to put it to one side of our house under our deck. The deck will give it some shelter, thus keep it dry and let it continue to dry out. That side of the house is made of cinderblocks, so there shouldn't be a termite problem. I also made sure that the pile was elevated to keep the bottom from getting damp and rotting or attracting insects. The entire pile makes no contact with the deck or the house. On the cinderblock base I laid two old fallen limbs which made for a sturdy base. The ends are each stacks of criss-crossed relatively square logs which add stability. Having done this, I feel like the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy who uses natural material like stone, ice, leaves, petals and wood to create order - or sculpture. I actually have two of his books which I received as gifts from my good friend Dave. Goldsworthy's appreciation of nature in his works, I'm sure, added some inspiration for my move from New York City to this place.

I've been told stories of people being cheated on wood deliveries. You order 3 cords, get 2. The only way to tell is to actually stack the wood and measure the volume. My stack is about 9 feet long, 6 feet high, and 16 inches wide. This is just over 71 cubic feet, plus I have about a quarter extra wood. This means that my 1/2 a cord was actually a little more than 1/2 a cord. Not bad at all.

One last note, in a crate next to the pile is a tiny pile of petrified wood which I have been dragging around for years. My family got it 30 years ago outside The Petrified Forest in Arizona. Petrified wood is actually fossilized wood. It is rock. It is millions of years old and will never burn. I gave a small log to the carpenters who last worked on our house, perhaps I should have given a log of it to the guys who own the firewood service.