Men like to argue, especially online, and especially about firewood. Its an opportunity to let people know that you know about BTUs and Husqvarna chainsaws and the absolute best way to stack firewood. So naturally this is a fiercely opinionated subject; how to dry firewood.
I’ve tried a number of approaches over about 8 years now primarily heating my house with wood. I’ve try uncovered, covered with a tarp, set on pallets, stacked in a circle, stacked like cordwood, and stacked in vertical towers 3 x 3 wide. Ultimately this is what I’ve found works best:
Maybe this isn’t a surprise; what works best is a proper wood shed with a roof over the wood. Tarps are terrible; a few years of rain and sun on them and they disintegrate leaving little blue bits all over your yard. Leaving wood just “out to dry” is a good way to never dry anything but have it perpetually wet with rains and full of nastiness. So you want a real roof, but with open sides for air flow and sunlight to get in. Stacking in a circle sounds pretty cool if your a Viking but is an inefficient use of space in an urban environment. So I stack logs like cordwood.
Putting logs on the ground is a sure way of making the bottom layer disgusting. A pallet works for a few years, but itself gets grossed up and yellow jackets – as I’ve painfully found out – love living underneath them. So you want to build a wood shed with proper concrete foundation to keep everything dry.
What else can we learn? I keep some logs unsplit so that I’ll have good long-running night logs for the winter, but for the rest the rule is “the more you split them the dryer they will get.” Many logs are split into fours or eights; massive logs perhaps 16 or more pieces. The length of a log should be about 16” for most stoves, but I’ve at times snaked much longer pieces into the stove and still managed to close the door.
It is pretty nice to fully dry wood, 2 or 3 years for some types. But the reality is you’ll probably need wood right away. Still, at least one summer is best for “seasoned” firewood to prevent creosote buildup in your chimney. And if you need wood right away, you can get away with burning Ash which is relatively dry when felled. Plus Ash is plentiful dying out fast with the borer beetle killing it off.
Happy drying and happy burning.