what do you consider to be the best fire wood

This is for those who cut wood for heat . What do you consider to be the best wood to burn? Thanks Geri

Oil.

Larch is the best stuff we get around here. Burns with some heat, but has a long burn too so it lasts. I think you can't beat really good Larch.

Tamarack , although Oak is awesome as well I don't like the idea of cutting a old tree down that took so long to grow just to burn it .JackPine heats awefully hot as well ,but depending on what you want to use it for ,in some cases the heat is to much for the pipes ? Inside a house .furnace , ? Pine or Poplar , fireplaces Poplar or Birch ,if you can afford Birch that is ? .My thoughts

uno wrote:Oil.

Ok who knows how to type the sound you make when you stick your toungue out and blow?
lololo
pssssssssssssssssss????

Okay...(heaving sigh) I am seriously sick of fires right now. All winter I am animal feeder and furnace feeder and if I don't have to light another furnace fire that would be fine by me!

We heat with a wood fired FURNACE, ducted throughout the house, where ghastly amounts of dust and smoke add to the overall dingey hue and greasy window look of my home. I have cobwebs so big you could use them as tow ropes. Ugh.

Our furnace is LARGE and could probably heat a much larger area. Because we have a tendency to overheat ourselves, we like certain wodds that might have a slightly lower heat value.

HUbby would tell you that the very best wood is FREE WOOD! If you get it for nothing....then it is excellent wood. Unless it's rotten and punky and soggy, then it really is crappy free wood. So only ever accept excellent free wood.

Birch produces too much heat for too long. We DIE in here if we stuff the furnace with birch. We also find that birch creates a lot of heavy ash very quickly. Must clean more often when burning birch. Birch also gets difficult to re-plit once it's dry, so if you are not Hercules on the axe, avoid birch. But it does have a high heat output.

We prefer pine and fir. Medium heaters, not too ashy, reasonable to re-split (for me) into smaller chunks since Hubby likes to split into Big Ugly Wood. I re-split down to a manageable size for me to handle.

HUbby works at cedar mill and sometimes brings home chunks of cedar which makes excellent kindling! As firewood it provides an intial burst of high heat to get the house warmed up, but burns very quickly, so not a long, overnight type of wood. Once we had a contractor stuff the furnace to the gunnels with cedar (what he was thinking I cannot say) and I think it hit 30 degrees in here and you couldn't get within 5 feet of the ducting. Super hot! Very dangerous. I thought the house was going to burn down!

I hate poplar. Seems every poplar tree that Hubby has lugged in is rotten and punky and he tells me to let it drain for a couple of days before I burn it. Great. It provides no heat but is meant to keep me busy stuffing the furnace. It may be a good wood if it it were dry and sound, but we get it soggy and rotten, so I cannot vouch for it.

We would like to try tamarac (larch) as people rave about it but it is not common here and thus we do not burn it.

No matter what you burn, DRY DRY DRY makes or breaks your wood. Good luck....burn oil.

Thank you very much for the replies. Some one opnce mentioned aspen or ash can't remember. It is for indoor heating.
Geri

We burn pine. Usually go shopping for the dead standing. The hubby has been eyeballing some 6 or so dead fir that make my back ache just looking at them.
Sadly enough I go on Dale Gribble's theroy of burn is burn. So I guess I'm not that much help We do however go thru oodles of wood because we heat everything with it I have shop heat, a big beautiful firplace and then the main stove downstairs. Thats alot of wood and the biggest pain is everybody has their own sizes so we cut 3 different sizes.

I like arbutus, bit its not an easy splitter.

When I was little my Dad took me to his home town in Germany. We went for a walk and passed a local woodlot. Dad stopped and looked at the forest thoughtfully.

"What do you see?" he asked.

"Trees." I replied, puzzled by the question.

"This used to be a beautiful oak woodlot filled with 500 year old trees." said Dad. "But by 1947 there was nothing left but beech saplings. In order to stay warm in the lean years at the end of the war when we had nothing, I cut down every last oak tree, one by one, in the dead of night and chopped them up as firewood to stay warm."

Sure enough, the woodlot was solely beech. Dad was a teenager at the end of the war.

Schipperkesue wrote:When I was little my Dad took me to his home
town in Germany. We went for a walk and passed a local woodlot. Dad
stopped and looked at the forest thoughtfully.

"What do you see?" he asked.

"Trees." I replied, puzzled by the question.

"This
used to be a beautiful oak woodlot filled with 500 year old trees."
said Dad. "But by 1947 there was nothing left but beech saplings. In
order to stay warm in the lean years at the end of the war when we had
nothing, I cut down every last oak tree, one by one, in the dead of
night and chopped them up as firewood to stay warm."

Sure enough, the woodlot was solely beech. Dad was a teenager at the end of the war.

Thank you for posting that. The reason I was asking what the best fire
wood was is because I just planted white spruce , colorado spuce, and
birch seeds. I thought I could plant the most popular fire wood to help
keep our trees. You probably think I am crazy but oh well.

Around here Maple would probably be first choice. Good long warm burn.

I've been cleaning out my scrap wood this year. I found old cedar siding burned well. Louvered doors were pretty good too. TV stands throw the most heat.

I have a wood stove in the studio and I burn mostly maple. We have a lot of 80+ year old maples that are coming to a natural death by falling over randomly or being blown down in high winds.

Maple is hard to split. Husband bought me a log splitter for Christmas a couple of years ago and that made me much happier. Seems to burn pretty good, though - not too fast, but plenty of heat.

Dad burnt the oak because it was the longest burning and hottest of the trees. Why waste your energy on the beech when you are nearly starving as well as cold.

authenticfarm wrote:I have a wood stove in the studio and I burn
mostly maple. We have a lot of 80+ year old maples that are coming to a
natural death by falling over randomly or being blown down in high
winds.

Maple is hard to split. Husband bought me a log
splitter for Christmas a couple of years ago and that made me much
happier. Seems to burn pretty good, though - not too fast, but plenty
of heat.

Thank you Do you know what kind of maple? I can get red maple and sugar
maple seeds.
G

Rasilon wrote:

Schipperkesue wrote:When I was little my Dad took me to his home
town in Germany. We went for a walk and passed a local woodlot. Dad
stopped and looked at the forest thoughtfully.

"What do you see?" he asked.

"Trees." I replied, puzzled by the question.

"This
used to be a beautiful oak woodlot filled with 500 year old trees."
said Dad. "But by 1947 there was nothing left but beech saplings. In
order to stay warm in the lean years at the end of the war when we had
nothing, I cut down every last oak tree, one by one, in the dead of
night and chopped them up as firewood to stay warm."

Sure enough, the woodlot was solely beech. Dad was a teenager at the end of the war.

Thank you for posting that. The reason I was asking what the best fire
wood was is because I just planted white spruce , colorado spuce, and
birch seeds. I thought I could plant the most popular fire wood to help
keep our trees. You probably think I am crazy but oh well.

....Spruce and white pine grow really slow with out the correct soil conditions ,and Birch die back around ten or so years ,maple will live longer ,but with it's branch system it has a tendancy to get wind damage .........and the pines need a HUGE amount of water to survive and grow .I have all of them growing at my property and the White pines do the best next to the Birch ,but I dig out my birch at around six feet tall so I have a better chance of getting a full grown tree sooner ,as well as the white pine .also dig them up at about three to four feet .

Schipperkesue wrote:When I was little my Dad took me to his home town in Germany. We went for a walk and passed a local woodlot. Dad stopped and looked at the forest thoughtfully.

"What do you see?" he asked.

"Trees." I replied, puzzled by the question.

"This used to be a beautiful oak woodlot filled with 500 year old trees." said Dad. "But by 1947 there was nothing left but beech saplings. In order to stay warm in the lean years at the end of the war when we had nothing, I cut down every last oak tree, one by one, in the dead of night and chopped them up as firewood to stay warm."

Sure enough, the woodlot was solely beech. Dad was a teenager at the end of the war.

...I can't even begin to imagine the girth of a 500 year old Oak ? Must have been HUGE !

We mostly burn fir or pine, but have some birch. The birch is the hottest followed by the fir. Cedar makes really good starter wood, but we only have a small number of cedar trees.

Hardwoods are generally better than softwoods to burn. Longer hotter burns with less creosote build up. However, they are also slow growing and harder to replace in this world. As well, getting hardwood into burning sized chunks may be a bit of a struggle.

i like a mix of different woods, if i had to go with one it would be larch (tamarack). i love birch but mostly burn pine and fir now and what ever easy stuff I can get. Spruce is my least favourite, doesn't give much heat at all and doesn't last. Maple would be great in a mix, as would oak. Any hard wood gives off lots of heat but also lots more ash.

I was reading that there is a television program currently in Norway all about fires - 12 hours of a fire burning. A bit like the Christmas station we get on television but this one talks about how to build a good fire, what to burn and how to look after it. Apparently it is hugely popular in Norway.

Those Norwegians - they do know how to have a good time!

Rasilon wrote:

authenticfarm wrote:I have a wood stove in the studio and I burn
mostly maple. We have a lot of 80+ year old maples that are coming to a
natural death by falling over randomly or being blown down in high
winds.

Maple is hard to split. Husband bought me a log
splitter for Christmas a couple of years ago and that made me much
happier. Seems to burn pretty good, though - not too fast, but plenty
of heat.

Thank you Do you know what kind of maple? I can get red maple and sugar
maple seeds.
G

No idea. I am not a tree person.

I thought out west you burned buffalo chips. I'm sure I saw that in a movie once.

Fowler wrote:I thought out west you burned buffalo chips. I'm sure I saw that in a movie once.

Only if you happen to have some buffalo around.

And if the buffalo chips aren't hidden under four feet of snow.

authenticfarm wrote:

Fowler wrote:I thought out west you burned buffalo chips. I'm sure I saw that in a movie once.

Only if you happen to have some buffalo around.

And if the buffalo chips aren't hidden under four feet of snow.

Yes, I see how collecting in winter could be a problem.