According to Al Bundy :
As a local volunteer firefighter told us, it's a "stick" they toss in the fireplace. The heat causes the "stick" to give of a lot of non-flammable gas that totally smothers the fire. As long as it hasn't spread outside of the chimney yet....
According to Harry K :
Or not getting the fire temperature up high enough.
Quaking aspen is a reasonably good firewood, just doesn't last very long and is sometimes difficult to get running hot enough.
As one person put it, pound for pound, given equivalent drying, all firewood is virtually identical in terms of heat output.
Quaking aspen is quite light, so you have to use a lot of it.
Most of our firewood tends to be spruce, pine or aspen. Which we leaven with heavier stuff (maple, birch and ash). No big creosote problems with a wood stove.
According to Steve B :
You might want to consider renting instead of buying.
Renting one for a day every year, with a couple of local teenagers for stoop and carry produces a _lot_ of firewood very fast without the hassle of storage/maintenance.
I deliver rental equipment for a local rental store. I stopped to pick up the splitter one evening and Grandpa was sitting on a "round" running the hydraulic lever. Dad was loading the splitter and Son was stacking the split logs. It looked like a Jack Daniels print ad from the 70's.
Rent once and get a feel for the amont of work involved. If you are up to it, buy your own.
Jim
Heh. I was the "grandpa" ;-)
Having a number of teenagers (including my son) able to move the wood fast, and having never used one before, it was thought safest to have one person concentrating on controlling the machine. Rather than having that much people movement, stumbling over a split, etc.
And I have a bad back.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it ;-)
The unit was convertible to vertical, and we had a couple of large rounds to split. The machine seemed less stable in vertical, more of a tendency to move around, with the foot end digging into the ground. So we switched back to horizontal.
But if you have a very large round, _hold_on_ to the splitter if in horizontal config, because the round might overbalance the splitter and try to tip it.
[This is fairly specific to this unit. Other units may not have these problems.]Before buying, consider what your cost for renting per year would be compared to buying.
One day did approx 2 bush cords with us amateurs. $80. With a new unit costing $1500 or more, that's a lot of years before payback.
But having your own means you can do it more leisurely.
snipped-for-privacy@nortelnetworks.com (Chris Lewis) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:
Cool. Thanks for the reply.
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