Miscellaneous Wood Subjects
A number of specialty subjects might be useful to wood burners.
Should pieces of firewood be split from the top down or the bottom up?
Since most people these days either buy their wood already split or they use hydraulic log-splitters, this is a somewhat irrelevant question these days. Even though old timer wood burners will adamantly tell you one or the other, careful experimental tests have shown that there is no advantage in time or effort in splitting from either direction. It doesn't matter! Wood pieces should be split along "check lines", cracks that have already formed in the piece during drying. This can significantly reduce the time and effort necessary to split pieces of wood.
There are people who believe that wood is split easiest if it is frozen.
The idea is that the pieces are more brittle and will sort of shatter. Surprisingly enough, experimental tests showed very little advantage of spliting firewood logs. Even more surprising, if most of the wood to be split is full of knots, there is actually substantial advantage of doing that splitting them thawed and not frozen!
There are people who insist that wood should be season dried for at least one or two years.
Experimental evidence has established that that is nearly always unnecessary, as long as the pieces of wood are cut to length and stacked. Natural air flows through the stack, and particularly through the cut cells of the pieces of wood themselves, dries them sooner than that. Experimental evidence has established that one-foot long cut pieces generally dry to acceptable levels in just two or three months. Two-foot long cut pieces take about six or seven months for similar acceptability. Four-foot long cut pieces DO require at least a year.
Associated with this, covering the woodpile with a tarp slightly improves this, but probably not enough to make the expense of a tarp worthwhile, except in a climate where rain and very high humidity is common. Similarly, split pieces of wood tend to dry slightly faster than full diameter logs, but again by minimal amounts.
There appears to be no value in drying firewood more than about nine months.
If wood is stacked in four-foot or longer lengths, the drying process is greatly slowed. In other words, if wood is cut to four-foot length and stacked, for nine months, and then cut to shorter burning length just before use, it will probably not burn well because it is still too wet (green).
An Entirely New Approach to Heating Your House
An interesting new source of home heating energy is now possible! Every year, YOU mow several tons of grass cuttings from your lawn. It turns out that each ton of such cut grass contains around 18 million Btus of chemical energy in it. What normally happens is that the cut grass simply DECOMPOSES (primarily due to the action of certain types of bacteria) and the cut grass simply seems to "disappear". That is technically not correct. It decomposes into the water vapor and the carbon dioxide that the plant initially used in growing during photosynthesis.
More interesting is that the ENERGY which had been captured during photosynthesis is STILL THERE! And it gets RELEASED during that decomposition!
Since the grass decomposes over a large area and over many weeks or months, it is rarely noticed that any heat is created as the grass decomposes. But you MAY have noticed that a BAG of cut grass can feel quite HOT a day later! THAT is that heat energy that necessarily gets released during decomposition. And since the First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, that means that essentially ALL of those 18 million Btus of chemical energy in that (dried) ton of cut grass IS AVAILABLE for use!
We have Engineered and Designed several devices which are very efficient at capturing this heat energy. There is NO BURNING involved at all! The grass (and leaves, and weeds, and crop residues, etc) is simply ALLOWED to decompose in its natural manner, but in an environment where we are able to CAPTURE the majority of the heat which is released. So these Firewood Charts above might reasonably be expanded to include many other types of organic materials, but NOT for BURNING (which is not a particularly efficient process) but for DECOMPOSITION (which can be nearly 100% efficient!)
A General Information web-page is provided at HeatGreen Concept
A more technical version of that discussion is provided at HeatGreen Concept (Advanced)
And complete construction instructions to use about $200 of materials to build the most effective version of these devices is provided at HeatGreen HG 3a Construction
These devices can ENTIRELY heat any home and also provide all the domestic hot water needed, along with some other interesting benefits. We have found that an HG 3a device can drive a system to extract absolutely pure (distilled) water directly from the atmosphere, as much as ten gallons of such pure water every hour! It can also be connected to a small greenhouse to enable that greenhouse to produce around FIVE TIMES AS MUCH vegetables and fruit as normal!