The nice thing about heating with wood around here is that the wood is free. Except for chainsaw maintenance. And chains. And time. And work. And occasional danger.
On the other hand a chainsaw, once you own it, is a lot cheaper than a pile of firewood somebody else cut. And it’s not like I don’t have time. And a little work is good for me. And if I can’t learn to look up and see where that tree is going to fall, I deserve to be standing on the spot it’ll occupy.
Mostly I burn trees killed by the road grader, because they’re so convenient. But the supply is finite, so this early in the season I decided to wade in and find something standing. Easy: Just look for the bare branches.
Juniper has disadvantages as firewood. None of it grows straight. It’s full of dirt, which makes it hell on chains. There’s a hell of a lot of useless junk you’ve got to wade through to get to the good stuff. It doesn’t burn especially hot.
On the other hand, junipers die in patches, so it’s easy to get already-cured wood without ever killing a tree. It smells great. It’s here, and it’s free. Basically, I burn juniper because it’s what I’ve got. Almost nothing else grows here big enough to be of any use at all.
Junk, junk, junk. I’ve got to get all this crap out of the way before I can get to the useable wood.
I came, I saw, I cut, I dragged…
I hauled.
Next step: Cut it to length, split it to size. Repeat. That little bit of wood cost me an hour’s hard labor. Getting it ready for the stove will probably take another hour. I spend a lot of winter time feeding the stove. It’s kind of a pain, but it beats wondering when the propane will run out. And I console myself that at least I don’t live in Minnesota.
Ah, but the MN wood is more straight-grained and the pine pitch is like kerosene. And it’s too cold for outsiders to come visit for trivial reasons.
Its not that bad up here, really.
We just lit the wood stove for the shop today, filled it up with a front end loader too.
Wait. What? You filled your wood stove with a front end loader? How the hell does that work? Pictures!
Well, I may have slightly exaggerated…
The front end loader brings the wood to the burner, some poor fool still has to toss it all in by hand. We did go through one bucket getting everything up to temperature though.
Well, I’m certainly glad it’s ‘not that bad up there.’ 🙂
Afternoons are still t-shirt weather here. If I had to service my stove with a tractor, I’d be emigrating to Juarez.
With the right setup (a Russian fireplace) that small stuff would be perfect. We generate a lot of small shop scrap, kiln dried hardwood and i often wish we had one of the masonry monsters to burn it in. They are a big mass of brick/stone with multiple flues and a small fire box which burns small stock very hot and quick. Then it just radiates the heat from the large thermal mass for a few hours.