Birch is pretty firewood, but it all depends on what the OP is after - a nice fireplace log or a good woodstove log. Birch is pretty much useless in the woodstove, but it does produce some nice looking flames.
Sadly incorrect. A pound of wood is pretty much a pound of wood, though conifers generally yield a bit more per pound because of the volatiles.
The difference is in inconvenience. Poplar is not caller gofer (gopher) wood for nothing, but the heat it produces per pound is based primarily on carbon, just like hickory. The trick is to burn and capture that heat efficiently. The stoves are skewed toward convenience, not efficiency. Your gas furnace doesn't damp the flame, it just burns it in spurts. With wood you've got a big pilot light to feed.
Folks back in the old country used to sleep on the stove, which was a long brick/mortar or mud construct designed to burn grass and twigs - rapidly - which got the greatest thermal benefit out of them. The mass of the stove captured BTUs pretty well, and kept things bearable, if not toasty, through the night.
Poplar is not a very good firewood. It will create lots of cresote in the chimney. I know from experience. I loaded my stove one night and closed the dampers so it would burn slow and last all night. The next morning cresote had formed on the door and was running out the door. It looked like tar.
Virgle
What kind of poplar? The western one that's related to aspen, or yellow-poplar AKA tulip poplar AKA tulip-tree?
-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)
Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt. And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?
Since you are a wooddorker, you must make sawdust.
"Pressed sawdust firelogs. These are made from tightly compressed 100% pure wood sawdust, without the addition of waxes, chemicals or other additives. Pound for pound, these give even more heat than natural firewood ? 8500 BTU per pound in comparison with 6400 BTU for natural wood. They can be used in fireplaces, woodstoves, inserts, and campfires. All in all, these firelogs give all the heat and more of natural wood, and have the convenience of popular wax firelogs."
Do what I do:
My fireplace burns quite nicely on skid wood.
I make regular pickups of skids from local merchants who are glad to be rid of them. Every now and then, you even find some wood good enough to use in the shop. Most of it is softwood, but hardwood isnt' uncommon. It's free and it's a replaceable supply - you just have to spend 20 minutes with a cordless circ saw out in the garage cutting it up.
PS - all my workshop "errors" end up in the fireplace too!
Brian
me too! I think it was the black helicopters..
mac
Please remove splinters before emailing
I hate to argue with Charlie, but in this case all the people weighing in on the firewood debate seem to be from areas where hardwoods reign. The truth is that if it will burn, it will heat. Dryer is better, and some woods work better than others, but essentially anything you can cram in the stove or fireplace will make heat.
For most of my life I've heated with wood. The ones I've used the most are fir, spruce, pine and alder. The alder was occasionally mixed with madrone and was when I lived in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. *All* of these woods produced plenty of heat and, if well dried, had no particular creosote problems. When I burned a lot of pine I would run the stove wide open for a half hour or so twice a day to burn off any build-up. Only once had to clean the chimney in 11 years in that house - and we heated 2500 square feet of uninsulated farm house in NE Washington state solely with wood for those years.
If you want fast firewood alder, poplar, aspen or cottonwood all will work. They will need to be well dried to approach efficiency, and will take more cords than some of the "better" woods, but they *will* work. During my time in the Puget Sound area a local forester suggested that if you had a reasonably efficient stove and an insulated house you could supply yourself perpetually with wood *in that climate* from one acre of ground, properly managed. The primary source of wood would have been aspen, because they would grow 5-10 feet per year and add an inch or more in diameter each year.
All the OP needs is a fast-growing tree that will produce wood. Yes, fast-growing means probably at least 10 years to firewood production, but if you plant heavily you can begin thinning at 5 years and be getting at least part of your wood after that. Constant re-planting and careful management should result in a perpetual firewood supply thereafter.
Tim Douglass
Wet.
That plus the damper is enough to assure incomplete combustion.
Yellow poplar Virgle
I've burnt pallet wood before. If they are the common softwood pallets, it is hardly worth the effort to cut them up. The wood burns up in no time. Hardwood pallets are much better, but the wood is sometimes better off in the woodshop.
Brian elfert
Well, yes, of course -- but the point is that some woods do a better job of making heat than others. I hope you don't mean to suggest that aspen and cottonwood make just as good firewood as hickory and white oak.
-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)
Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt. And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?
Well, I think you might've been burning something else... I've burned an awful lot of yellow poplar in my fireplace, and have _never_ seen even a hint of creosote from it.
-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)
Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt. And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?
I think too, that one has to consider the point of diminishing return. I normally only burn Oak and Hickory but if it only burns 30% longer and hotter than a wood that is half the price you need to draw the line some where.
B Man responds:
And most trucking companies will be delighted to let you pick up used pallets and take them home. Just ask at the dispatch office. They have to pay to have the stuff hauled away.
Charlie Self "I think we agree, the past is over." George W. Bush
Yes, it hardly ever is a good idea to grow your own firewood.
However it is not true that all tree species are equal. Some species will give more useful firewood than others (books do exist). Mostly everybody who was seriously engaged with such things used a coppicing system (rotation times much shorter than thirty years). But it is hard work. There are easier ways of getting firewood. PvR
hickories, and sugar maples. The wood of fast-growing trees is inherently less dense, and hence does not make as good firewood, as the wood of slow-growing trees. Poplar specifically is not good firewood; it burns rapidly, and has little fuel value.
firewood "in a short amount of time" from *any* tree that you plant. That just doesn't happen. Not by _human_ standards, anyway. Thirty years *is* "a short amount of time" _to_a_tree_.
long as you're willing to work for it. If your city or state government removes a tree, you may be able to get the wood just by asking for it (as long as you're able to haul it away). If you have a chainsaw, you could offer to cut up fallen trees (or limbs) for your neighbors after a storm, in exchange for the wood. In some states, you can get firewood *very* cheaply in state-owned forests. Here in Indiana, for example, the state sells logging rights to commercial timber harvesters. The commercial guys are usually interested only in the first 30-40' of trunk, and they leave the rest on the ground. After they're done, Joe Citizen can come in and take whatever he wants for three bucks a pickup truck load.
I think that all depends on where you look. In the Housotn area our company used to get 15 to 25 pallets weekly. We sold them for $2 each and they had to come and get them ALL with no culling throug for the good ones.
Black locust grows fast and is reputed to burn quite hot.
Bah! Not one exotic on there! C'mon! Wouldn't real men burn Zebrawood, Wenge or Mahogany??? Whadda about Ebony! That's gotta make great kindling!
Luigi Z. responds:
Trimmings, limbs, etc. are abundant. I could probably visit a logging site tomorrow and come away with 2-3 cords of wood for the cutting, all of it 6" in diameter or less. And sometimes there's not much choice, when the inside of a huge old oak is rotted away and it comes down in a storm--I heated for nearly two winters with an oak that had been about 42" in diameter and I have no idea how tall--80' at least. Between the limbs and the outer 1' of that trunk, I had myself an immense wood pile. I once cut a standing dead hickory, too. Talk about hard! I didn't think it would ever fall, and then it was nearly impossible to split...only about 12" in diameter, with center rot for some reason.
It isn't necessary to cut lumber woods. Got a friend who just the other day decided to clear his yard of some bigleaf maple stumps. Cut them to ground level, started splitting and liked the spalted lumber that was in several of them. He now has a stash of short (18" or so) narrow spalted maple boards, along with a few chunks for turning. No waste there.
Charlie Self "I think we agree, the past is over." George W. Bush
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