I’m obsessed with my firewood

 

With temperatures around here stubbornly low we’re burning lots of firewood – about 2 barrow loads a day of birch. Having posted about firewood and logs I’ve started to become obsessed by the moisture content of my firewood.

With no barn or logstore to dry it thoroughly it’s not going to be as dry as I’d like and this year I’ve been caught out by the early freeze without a  large enough stack of split wood prepared (I turned a bit too much into charcoal).  I am taking cordwood from stacks and after discussing it recently I’ve started to worry about the moisture content of the wood, so I’ve decided to measure it. You could do this with a moisture meter if you can borrow one, but as  the logs will probably dry unevenly I’ve decided to do it the DIY way.

 

Once the wood has been split I stack it along the side of the house to dry, but in this weather it can’t. To find the moisture content of the firewood I’ve weighed 10 sample logs on bringing them into the house. I stack the logs indoors by the stove for at least a day prior to burning and I’ve weighed the 10 logs again when they are ready to burn so I can calculate how much they have dried – an average of 12% ( I think using birch here helps as it’s relatively quick to dry). But I still need to calculate the remaining moisture content of the logs.

 

To do this I’ve cut up each log, weighed a slice and then microwaved it until it’s just about dry and weighed it again.

I can now reveal the average moisture content of the firewood when it comes into the house is 27% – which not too good (the maximum was 40% and the minimum 11%).

After a day’s drying by the fire it’s 18% on average (maximum 29% and minimum 0%) which is much more acceptable – though not as good as I’d like. Normally it doesn’t make much difference but with the much colder weather drier firewood makes a noticeable difference to the heat from the fire.

 

I’ve only measure birch so far – it would be interesting to know if oak and beech have similar moisture content and dry as fast?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fernhurst Furnace Open Weekend – September 2010

Amongst my favourite shows of the year (yes I do have a lot of favourites) is the annual open weekend at the Fernhurst Furnace. It’s local, about as uncommercial as you can get and the woodland site is packed with fascinating history.  The Furnace is one of the many Wealden Iron Works that were the main source of Iron from Roman times until the late 18th Century and it operated from around 1614 for over 150 years producing iron for local forges (the site of the medieval hammer forge at Pophole is only a few hundred yards from me) and casting cannon. Once the iron industry centralised at sites like Ironbridge the Wealden furnaces quickly fell into disuse and little remains of their long history, but unlike many there is still a lot to conserve at the Fernhurst Furnace and it’s the centre of a fascinating local history.

Here are a few photos from the weekend. To spare you all the details I’ve put a page with more photos in the gallery section of the site. Click on the Gallery tab or follow this link (not working yet).

The Furnace was in operation during the English Civil War and at the Open Weekend members of the Sealed Knot put on a display of Civil War skirmishing and fighting from pikes and muskets to small cannon.

 

I think we had more than the members of the usual regiment this year, enough for plenty of banging as muskets fired.

Some of the most impressive remnants of the furnace are the retaining walls for the pond and the original overspill which is now in danger of collapse. Some of the most urgent repairs to the site include the provision of a new overspill tunnel to bypass the original and help to prevent the erosion of the archaeology.

 

This scale model of the furnace gives an idea of how it might have looked in operation. Behind the model you can see  the stream and remains of the wheel pits, furnace and casting pits as they are today.

 

I wasn’t short of assistance at this show, here Sandy tries his hand at the polelathe whilst Cameron (who was with me earlier this year on a course) shows him how a blank should be shaved. This show was the first outing for the final version of the Bole-lathe, for this year at least.

 

I was joined on Sunday by Robert who rapidly got the hang of making Besoms, traditional Birch brooms, and had soon worked his way through the bundles of Birch that I had with me. Note his compact shave horse, any smaller and it would be a shave stool?

 

I’d been busy practicing bowls on the new lathe.

 

Amongst the crafts being demonstrated Robert, Nick and Nigel were banging metal and competing with the sound of gunfire from the muskets.

 

While Fergus from Butser Ancient farm was demonstrating metal smelting using a simple clay furnace. I had hoped to catch more photos of Fergus in action but somehow I ended up too busy to take photos

 

This year’s Siberian Candles (or log candles I think they are sometimes called) were my best ones yet. Still hit and miss as I don’t get much time to prepare them. The evening entertainment was as good as ever and in no small part thanks to Fran (head brewer at Ballards Brewery) for introducing us to a pint (or two) of ‘Wild’ – made by mixing Ballards Wassail and Mild.

 

Great Show, great location and most of all great people doing interesting things. I spend so long looking forward to it and then its over in a flash. Luckily it will still be there next year and I’m looking forward to it again already.

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Where’s my shovel, Oak leaves and Overdue Landrover Restoration

I’d like to claim it’s all the fault of the weather, but really it’s just my lack of preparation, a bit like my blog really – and there are still several items to catch up on so I will shortly be posting on some of the shows that flew by in the autumn.  Somehow I managed to leave my big shovel up at the barn after using it to shovel a big pile of s*&t….errr….. manure  so I had to take a trip up to the barn in the snow. An opportunity to take some more photos.

I used to put the doortops on my 1965SWB  during the winter but recently I’ve not bothered so it has natural air conditioning all year round. It certainly stands out in the snow – people can’t quite believe it. Since I don’t go far and am always hauling gear in and out it makes sense to me, after all there it no heater so it’s not going to be much warmer with the doortops on and the canvas down.

One thing that is strange at the moment is the combination of deep snow and the leaves on the oak trees. I’m not sure why but a lot of the oaks still have a lot of leaves on at the moment. Am I  going mad or is this normal?

In the snow the commons take on a kind of Narnia like appearance.

You tend to notice features and shapes which stand out now but are not so remarkable when everything is green.

Meanwhile back at the shed, the snow has put paid to finishing the work on a Landrover restoration project. This landrover which is known as Puff because of it’s numberplate PFF623 – and because it’s Puff the magic landrover – it just appeared! – has had a lot of work done this year and with my friend Richard we’re not far from getting it done.

It will be perfect for hauling the firewood – but in this weather it seems that Alison has taken a shine to it so I may have to rethink the plan. At the moment it’s fighting with the shavehorse for room in the shed whilst we work on the brakes and redo the wiring harness.

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Of fires and firewood

The early freeze has caught me a little unprepared as we don’t have much spare around the cottage to store wood and I need to get into the woods to collect more firewood soon. My hopes of a swift thaw have been dashed. It looks like we’ll get freezing rain tonight instead and with the ground so cold it will add ice to the snow. Still it was pretty this evening as the sun set on the snowy scene – it’s been several degrees below zero all day!

 

 

Until I can get into the woods I’ve been eaking out our supply around the house by clearing up in the yard. It’s easy to get into a rut with and think of some species as ‘firewood’.  There is a fair amount of Ash in my yard at the moment and I know plenty of people who’d regard it as seasoned – but as I never quite know where the next load of Ash for turning is coming from I’m loathe to burn it  (yet)!

Ash is a prime example of this, far too valuable to burn in my view unless it’s no use for planking, turning or handles, but it makes the best firewood by far according to many. Why is this? What is it that causes one wood to have the right qualities and the next not? There is a lot of firewood lore about and what is it based upon?

Peter Jameson emailed me about my post on ‘logs to burn‘ to say  ‘does the poem mean Horse or Sweet Chestnut? In my experience Sweet Chestnut burns well but spits. Horse not so well and is a swine to split the fibres crush and laugh at the splitting axe. ‘ I’d assumed it was referring to Sweet Chestnut as common lore is that Horse Chestnut is no good as firewood. But why is that?

 

I’ve just been burning  well seasoned Sweet Chestnut on our stove. Some of it found it’s way onto our open fire which is a Jetmaster, a bit like a stove without a door,  and I agree with Peter.  Surprising how light well seasoned chestnut is, but it still pops and bangs, though not too much, great firewood but you wouldn’t want it in range of a new carpet (ours is not so new!).

I’ve also tried out some well seasoned Holly which seemed fine – I didn’t really notice to be honest. With plenty of dark hours to spare I turn to Google (and Wikipedia my favourite on-line encylopedia which has blown away the business models of the commercial ones) to learn a little about what it being said about firewood online.

 

Cue a photo of the pretty sunset on the commons this afternoon. First time the sun has been out for quite a while, get it while you can at this time of year.

Back to the firewood. Freshly felled wood can be upto 60% moisture. Wet (or green) wood is hard to burn, with so much moisture it’s hard to light and when it does burn much of the released energy is used to burn off the water as steam – which in turn is released into the flue or chimney. Without a  strong draw fed by a  hot fire  the steam will likely condense on the sides of the chimney together with any unburnt volatile chemicals in the smoke. A bit like a garden bonfire greenwood will burn cool, smoky and smelly.

As well as being a poor heat source this is also a way of increasing your carbon footprint, not reducing it, as the incomplete combustion produces unnecessary greenhouse gases and toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. To reduce your carbon footprint the combustion needs to be as complete as possible reducing the exhaust gases. So burning green firewood is not Green at all if you seen what I mean, in terms of climate change at least!

The calorific value of burning greenwood at 60% is typically about 1.7KWh/Kg but as the moisture reduces to 25% this can increase to 4 KWh/Kg.  Note to self – drying my firewood properly will mean I need less, or produce twice as much heat!

Interestingly the calorific value of all wood species is about the same in KWh/Kg. But of course, the weight or density of each type of wood varies a lot. Since firewood is traditionally sold by volume that can make a big difference to the heating power of a load. The densest (heaviest) woods yield almost twice as much heat from a log as the lightest woods. Typically fast growing softwoods are lightest and oak the densest with other woods spread between depending a little upon how fast grown they are – as fast growing tends to lighten the density of the wood.

That’s a long winded way of saying that you’ll get 4 times as much heat from the pickup load of seasoned oak as you will from a pickup load of unseasoned softwood.  But it’s more complicated than that, of course.

Typically the densest woods have a structure that’s hard to burn efficiently and they tend to smoulder. Perhaps wood that tends to be knotty and twisted in grain has a similar problem with burning unless the fire is hot enough? This might help to explain why Elm and Horse Chestnut have such a poor reputation as firewood, combined of course with how hard they are too split.

It seems to me that the ultimate firewood will be the one that has the best balance of characteristics. It needs to be low in moisture content (so it’s easy to dry), medium density so it’s not too hard to burn but has reasonable lasting properties, low in volatile chemicals so it’s not too smokey or clogs up the chimney and last but not least easy to split. Not surprising that Ash wins the contest then. But if you don’t have plenty of spare ash, knowing how to select, split, season your firewood and which to feed onto the fire to start and to last will do you just as well if not better!  Must go now – just off to pick up a load of Birch – great firewood burnt hot, but you do get through it.

 

 

 

 

 

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Stay in and light a fire

Well a decent fall of snow has arrived to go with the freezing temperatures day and night. All of which doesn’t help to make going out too attractive. As they said on the radio this morning ‘stay in and light a fire’ – though this photo is taken from outside looking in to the fire.

 

So plenty of office work to do, but it’s a lot more interesting to watch all the birds going mad in the garden – but then we have laid on a feast for them.

 

And there are still some berries around, here some late Rowan berries are breakfast for a Blackbird.

and we had the bullfinch visit the table this morning as well.

 

Eerily quiet on the lane outside the house, with no rush to work, no school traffic, no deliveries, no post, no rubbish collection and only the odd 4×4 moving.  But no rush to go out today as far as this Landrover is concerned.

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Fatman and the Birds

 

With daytime temperatures below zero for the last week or so it’s been a little too cold for much woodwork. Firewood has been my main concern (and that of most of my neighbours). I suspect it’s fetching premium prices right at the moment? Luckily I’d just managed to bring a load down from the commons before the snow hit us.

Alison has been concerned at the plight of the birds in the garden now that the snow has arrived. Meet the abominable fatman! A fatball, but made in a gingerbread man cutter. The feeders are great for the small birds but the thrushes and the blackbirds can’t reach them.

 

Our thrush quickly made the acquaintance of the abominable fatman, though I’m not entirely sure what they discussed?

and the robin stopped by for a quick peck as well. The strange shape over the table is an old metal lampshade fitting which we’ve found it perfect to stop the pigeons but let’s all the small and medium sized birds onto the table.

 

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