Firewood - The Truth

[George]

With 4' lengths, I did the Abe Lincoln method. For stovewood, two men - one setting, one swinging a maul - can outwork a splitter. As long as they're not old and fat....

[George]

No, you missed it. They don't displace cellulose by anything. The cube is still the cube, just weighs more because it's got a lot of resin in it, where the reference cube had open channels. Now if you go back to the same weight, it has more calories.

The hydrocarbons composing the resin have a higher heat content than cellulose. Not, as Andy said originally, a "huge" difference, but enough to say confidently that they make a 5-8% more heat per pound over the average wood lacking them.

[George E. Cawthon]

You are still missing the point, no one is talking about a cube, they are talking about a pound. If the pound is partially resin then there is less cellulose, the cellulose is "displaced by the resin."

I read the two citations on BTU per pound of different kinds of woods. One simply indicated the difference was primarily attributable to lignin (which is not surprising), not volatiles, which was the point of the study. Although it also said that the volatiles had more heat than the cellulose. That did surprise, as I would not expect pitch to have a higher BTU content.

A criticism of the citation on the cellulose/lignin BTU content was the very small sample size; I believe one was 4 boards (possibly from the same tree?). I would bet that there is nearly as much difference among the same species grown in different locations and altitudes and among subspecies as there is among different species or even between most hardwoods and conifers.

We are still agree that there is not a huge difference in BTU content among species. In the actual heating process, there is probably much greater difference in realize heat from the way stoves are operated based on the statements in one of the citations and based on my own experience.