I’m Jake Kutcher from Westfield, Vermont. We have a business here called Kutcher’s Maple Shop and Bed and Breakfast. And we use a lot of wood on this farm for fuel. We live in Northern Vermont where it’s pretty cold. Actually today, the temperature is kind of chilly.
We’ve cut some firewood here and I’m going to give you a few tips about how wood should be stacked so that it gets dried out so that it’s not soggy when you try to burn it in your furnace.
If you cut wood and leave a pile the way this is behind me, it will pick up moisture from the ground. So one of the things that I think is very important is to have a few planks that you put on the ground to begin with so that you have a foundation. And also on the ends of the wood plow, it’s quite important to be able to—if you want to have a square end, it’s pretty important to kind of pick your pieces, pieces that will fit and be able to stack. And you have to kind of work with them a little bit, pick your pieces. If the wood pile is not stacked properly, you may have a pile that looks pretty nice for a few minutes and maybe a little bit later, gravity is going to try to make it fall. So you wouldn’t want that to happen as much as possible.
So on the end of my woodpiles, I like to crisscross them so they can kind of build an end that tips in just a little bit so that it doesn’t fall over. As you see, wood is not all symmetrical. You have to use a little bit of ingenuity to get your piles to be leveled. Sometimes if a piece of wood is bigger on one end than the other, you can use that. You use a piece in its best position. Sometimes, you flip it over one way, sometimes the other so that it stays somewhat level so that the pile just doesn’t just fall over.
In some situation, it’s like an hour since most of our woodpiles are piled inside our woodsheds. So we have some poles at the ends of the piles that keep our piles from falling over. But with a little bit of care, you’re able to make your woodpile stand pretty square with just a little careful stacking. There we go.
One of the very important thing is safety wise for burning firewood is that it would be good and dry, not fresh cut. And we use the term greenwood, that means trees that are cut fresh. If you want that wood to really burn well and be efficient, it’s good that that would be seasoned maybe for at least six months. Ideally, what we do is we cut next year’s wood this year so that we don’t have to worry that we’re trying to burn a wood that’s too green or has too much moisture in it.
And why do we want to burn dry wood? First of all, it’s more efficient. Secondly, it’s safer. If you burn greenwood in your furnace in your house, you’re likely to have some preset problems which could cause a fire and you might lose your house. One of the nice things about stacking wood the way that I’m doing it here is that air goes through the woodpile and it dries much more quickly. One of the telltale signs of wood that has been seasoned for awhile is when you look at the ends and you start seeing a lot of little cracks in it, that means it’s well on its way to drying. It doesn’t mean that it’s completely dry but it’s on its way to doing that.
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