Is this a bad idea?
We have a small room in our cellar, about 4' square which I want to use as a wood store. If I had a load of non-seasoned wood, would it be the wrong place to store it while it seasoned? The room isn't ventilated beyond a low level vent in the door and an air brick at high level through to another similar sized room where the coal chute goes.
I could fit more ventilation if that is what would be needed, but it may be easier just to buy seasoned wood.
Cheers
Yes. Good air circulation is essential. Where timber is air dried commercially, it's sticked to separate the boards and stored in either open-sided or slat-sided buildings. Without good air circulation, there's a good chance you will get fungal attack and possibly warping from uneven drying.
Yes Danny - I have to agree. You would be better storing it outside sticked with some sort of open cover over it let the wind blow through.
Rob
No, thats fine for basics green-to-seasoned planking etc., and for firewood, but for joinery you really want it inside the central heating zone a few months before cutting.
I am not so convinced. I've left wood in a sealed garage (apart from small leaks) and it dries pretty well.
There must be leakage into te rest of the house as well. IME the real issue is keeping the rain off it.
We pulled some 5 year old scaffold planks up today..the ones that had been in contact with soil had rotted, ut just expose to the wind and rain - not much rot at all. Thats with NO cover at all
The actual rate of moisture loss from wood is really low. I don't think ventilation is as much an issue as just keeping the air RH below 70% or so.
Which in any case is what it gets to on a wettish day outside under cover.
Probably I've yet to come across a cellar that isn't damp... You do need lots of ventilation, you'd probably have to add some forced ventilation rather than just bigger holes.
if its rough old firewood wouldnt you be bringing all kinds of wood bugs into the building?
if its building wood then someone just said it should be at room temperature so it doesnt shrink or expand when its fitted to a room..
Room humidity rather than room temp.
Thermal coefficient of wood is very low, but it absorbs water like nobodies business
It's reckoned that wood dries outdoors to a moisture content of 17% in winter, and 15% in summer. This is what you expect joinery quality from a timber merchant to be. But for indoor stuff and furniture, it should ideally be around 10%, which is only achieved by keeping it indoors for a few weeks. In an ideal world you wouldn't plane the timber until then
100% agreement here. I got some oak and made an architrave out of it. Fully seasoned in a closed shed and kiln dried before that...after the winter CH, its now got 0.5mm gaps between all the sections.
We cut green wood and leave it in piles in the rain for a year or so.. Then it gets split and shoved in te back of a tarp covered Land Rover which is the wood store. After a week,it doesn't hiss when you burn it. It's sopping wet when it goes in to the Land Rover. Ergo, its ACTUAL content even in the rain is pretty low, and pretty much superficial. Once the wet exterior dries off, its about as dry as it would have been being stored under cover. The only difference is the parts that stay permanently wet, get amazing fungal growths all over. Those are surface only, until they break the wood down enough for rain to penetrate further.
So my feeling on this is that once cut, wood dries unless its buried in wet soil.
Even in the rain. There are dozens of dead trees in the local woods, all stripped of bark., They fall over, and the wood is actually dry and not rotten - only where ground contact exists does it rot. So I think all of this bunk about wood treatment is just bunk. Fell it, plank it to stop it splitting, keep it off the ground, and leave gaps between planks to prevent water spooling, and it will be usable timber in a year and even rain on it won't hurt, as long as it can evaporate off reasonably fast.
Its moisture content will stabilise at the average sort of 'outdoor' level whether it's covered, or not. Around the stated 15%-17% level..what is green wood? 50%? anyway the bulk of the moisture simply leaves it.
THEN if you want it for joinery, it needs to ebe moved from he cellar/shed into the house, and left for about 4-6 weeks ideally. Then machine it to size.
Timber merchants store presure treated constructional wood outside, uncovered.
Its no big deal really.
Or at the bottom of a lake, which used to be common practice in Scandinavia
>
I must have missed something in this thread, are we talking about seasoning planks for joinery or firewood?
If we're talking about a modest amount of planks and the cellar is not naturally damp then worst case is you'd need to add a small fan to one of the vents. If you're talking about dobbing a whole heap of fresh logs onto the floor then you'll have problems getting enough air through the heap before it starts rotting, which means both loss of dry matter and production of more water which needs carrying off.
Even so split logs do dry out ok in my brother's redundant pig shed over a summer with natural ventilation, that's the key, passing enough m^3 of unsaturated air through the heap.
AJH
Well how much water can there be in a cu m (a few tonnes) of logs? 500 liters? and that takes about a year to dry..so thats as much as ..gasp -
10 liters a week? Gosh thats nearly a liter a day..spread out over an area of lord knows how much. Hardly taxing is it?
Bzzt. Most woods will float in water so the density must be less than one tonne per m^3. IIRC for most species it's in the range 600 - 750 kg/m^3 - hardly "a few tonnes." At 20% MC your 500 litres comes down to 120 - 150 litres in reality.
That's right for a solid cubic metre, chop it into a jumble of logs and the bulk volume doubles.
Green densities are around a tonne for a solid cubic metre for oak and beech but that contains about 47% water.
As above, a 2 cubic metre heap of chopped, green logs will contain about 500litres of water, you need to drop that to 25%mc wwb to avoid most microbial activity, that's about 155 litres remaining. Aside from any water formed by respiration of dry matter this 345 litres of water has to leave carried away by air and that air has to provide the heat to change the state of the water from liquid to vapour. At 20C saturated air can carry about 20 grammes of water per m^3, with natural draught and our humidity I'll doubt you can get within half that and a stack off logs won't have good circulation. It looks like about 34k m^3 of air needs to move through the logs. Say the volume passed by a psu fan for 33 days when humidity is low and temperatures are above 20C. With the caveat that the logs have to be chopped small enough for the interior to remain at equilibrium with the surface during that time.
AJH
Even better then. I.e. you are reinforcing my argument that there isn't that much water in wood, and over a year, the evaporation rate is really miniscule.
No heat is required: All that is required is that the air is not saturated with water.
That doesn't happen. Logs dry out on the surface first, and then a gradient is set up. The initial dry is quite rapid - days only..its getting the core water out that takes the time, hence the need to plank and stack.
All that is required really is to find a place where the air is unsaturated, and stays that way. Kiln drying works to speed this up, but its not essential, and arguably doesn't actually do any more than rapidly reduce the overall humidity of the wood, the actual achievement of equilibrium happens later over time. Fresh kiln dried wood is still highly prone to movement afterwards.
For that reason its unlikely that unheated wood will dry properly in less than a year or so, not for joinery purposes anyway.
At which point the required air movement is far far less.
Tropical hardwoods air dry very effectively at close to 100% RH
A bit of science:
But not AT 100% RH..
;-)
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