Oh, I tried to burn that “seasoned” firewood, yes I did. When you’re cold, you make fires with what you have. But it was near impossible to set it on fire. I’d mix it with about 50% kiln dried cut-offs from the scrap bin, and when that got meager, I cut up usable lumber like 2 x 4s to supplement it. I pulled down the OSB ceiling in the basement, and chopped up some rude shelving to make fires underneath our asbestos firewood. It would have been easier to get rid of a corpse. Wet wood doesn’t burn.

I learned my lesson. If we were going to burn firewood, I’d have to dry it myself. When the spring rolled around, we still had some of the damp squib pile moldering in the yard. I was determined to use it next season, and get a whole lot more. I did a lot of research on drying wood for firewood.

The internet. Jayzuz, the internet. No one has any idea what they’re talking about on the internet. If they do, they’re buried so far down on the search results that you’d need a Geiger counter to find them. The more prominent the opinion, the more likely it is to either be useless or worse than useless. That’s why I’m so tickled that no one reads this website. Ipso facto it proves how smart I am. Sorta. I think. OK, maybe not. But I do know how to dry firewood. Here’s how:

First, get some firewood.

If you must, cut and split your own firewood. Many of my neighbors buy whole logs and have them dumped in their yards, and then cut, split, and stack them at their leisure. I can’t believe I put ‘leisure’ in a sentence about cutting, splitting and stacking firewood, but there it is, as prominent as a carbuncle on your nose. I do things like that to prove I’m not a bot. Bots never use the perfectly wrong word. They’re trained by reading the internet, so they use only vaguely wrong words.

Anyway, it’s too much work to process whole logs for the money you might save, if you ask me. You can buy cords upon cords of cut, split firewood and have it delivered. We did. The first full year, we bought 6 cords, but it wasn’t enough. We bought 8 the year after, and that wasn’t enough. As a matter of fact, the word ‘enough’ and the word ‘firewood’ have never been successfully concatenated before. You have to staple a ‘not’ in front of them like a hood ornament to get them to make sense.

Let’s move on, then. There are three kinds of firewood you can buy:

Kiln Dried Firewood-

Lawdy lawdy, Rockefeller, you’re buying firewood baked in an oven? It will be seasoned, I’ll say that for it. I think it would be smarter to go to the Orange Place and burn framing lumber. That’s kiln dried, too, and it might be cheaper. When I showed you the chart the other day in A Little Regler BTU Math with firewood prices, they weren’t referring to this kind of stuff. The chart says that firewood is $15.91 per million BTU. Kiln dried firewood would be about the same as buying heating oil, $25-$30 per million BTU. Maybe more. And I don’t know what your oil delivery service is like, but they don’t generally make you stack the oil, or carry it into the house in buckets. Rich people buy kiln-dried firewood to have showy fires in their ski lodges. We’re just trying not to freeze to death, or go broke(r). No need to explore KD further.

Seasoned Firewood-

This is going to be a lot easier on all of us if you simply discount the concept that seasoned firewood is actually seasoned. It’s not. It never is. The firewood dealer probably doesn’t know how to do it, and even if they do, they’re funning with you. Everyone will swear up and down that the log laid in the yard for a year, or the heap of split wood was only partially in a mud puddle all summer, or it was covered the whole time, so rain won’t get in, or whatever bosh the probably truly believe, but just nod and smile and ask for:

Green Firewood-

Look, the firewood isn’t going to be dry, no matter how much you beg and pay for seasoned wood. Why pay extra for it? In the off-season, which is roughly spring and summer and a little bit of fall, you can get all the green firewood you want, and you can take a third off the million BTU price that I mentioned earlier. It’s really cheap. Buy it cut, split, and delivered, and stack it yourself. Firewood dealers love selling green firewood because they split the stuff right into the back of their truck, and get rid of it immediately. It doesn’t take up space by hanging around pretending to get seasoned.

For all you Paul Bunyan wannabes out there, I can assure you that it’s still plenty of work to stack eight cords of wood. Lugging it inside, bit by bit, and burning it every day isn’t a picnic either. You can hang up your axe and still work on your pecs, I promise.

And now I’d like to say a word in defense of the firewood guy. I’ve lambasted him, excoriated him, mocked him, and cast aspersions on his wood-drying skills here. Doesn’t mean I don’t like him, or respect him. You see, I live in Maine, and it’s really hard to get cheated in Maine. People are generally honest and pleasant, if a bit taciturn. There are some sharp dealers, but not a lot of outright crooks in any walk of life. Plenty of people are incompetent, it’s true, because they’re people. Human being are frail, timid, defective creatures, or seem so until two of them reach for the last donut at the same time in the break room at work and start throwin’ hands. Then they seem plenty sturdy and forward. I’m not originally from Maine, so I’m a special case. I’m so bad at so many different things that I’m an incompetence polymath. Most people here, to their credit, specialize.

Let’s face it. It’s hard to dry firewood properly, and for the most part, it’s not practical for people who deal in firewood to do it for you. The only way to properly dry firewood is out in the open, on a hard surface, stacked neatly, with a cap on top of it, for a long time. If you’re dealing in hundreds or thousands of cords of wood, I can’t imagine how much space it would take up, and how much effort you’d have to add to the process (and the price) to handle it twice, or three times, instead of once. There’s a reason why firewood dealers have their junks in big piles. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.

Well, that and selling it for $100/cord more, because it’s “seasoned.”

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting. Please tell a friend to visit Sippican Cottage]