It’s the season for stoking woodstoves and laying in firewood. But those are arts that, up to now, I’ve only been the beneficiary of. I like sitting by a glowing stove, but I’ve never had to make sure it was fueled by a properly managed woodpile. Learning how to do these things right in my first winter on Cape Cod would require finding an expert.
Alex Emmons was the person to talk to, I was told. Emmons is a carpenter who heats his family’s Wellfleet house mostly with wood. He’s lucky, I learned, as far as sourcing goes. Because he’s in construction, he’s often able to gather wood from trees felled in the course of his work. Still, it takes him a full year of scrounging to come up with the two or three cords he burns in a winter. A cord is 128 cubic feet of wood — a stack that measures 4 by 4 by 8 feet.
Emmons hasn’t yet stacked all of his winter supply — it’s still waiting to be split. He likes red oak, he says, but white oak is even better. It’s denser and more rot resistant, and it has a higher BTU rating (British Thermal Units are the measure used to describe how much heat is released when fuel is burned). A cord of red oak will produce around 24 million BTUs, white oak from 25 to 29 million.
The very best wood for burning, says Emmons, is black locust. “It splits well, if you can get around the knotty sections,” he says. “It’s extremely rot-resistant and has a great BTU rating.” He has dulled a few chainsaw blades on the stuff, though. The high silica content in its bark will do that.
Most people here don’t gather their own firewood locally. I called Dennis Townsend, owner of R.W. Townsend & Sons in Wellfleet, one of a handful of tree services that sell firewood here. About three quarters of what he supplies to his 300 or so customers comes from Maine and New Hampshire, Townsend says.
Depending on what you’re heating, Townsend thinks it’s worth it to buy kiln-dried wood. It’s expensive — he charges $645 for a kiln-dried cord as opposed to $450 for a cord of regular seasoned hardwood.
The kiln-dried wood is insect-free and clean enough that people can keep some of their supply at hand indoors. But your main woodpile is always going to be outdoors. And not right next to your house, says Townsend. You want both your woodpile and your walls to stay dry and bug-free.
Emmons says covering the wood is “absolutely paramount,” but you never want to tuck a tarp over your pile. “That seals in the moisture, and mold will develop on the wood,” he says. A purpose-built shed is ideal: the wood should rest above the ground on a pallet; a roof provides cover; and an open side provides airflow to discourage rot.
But Emmons is into economy, and he touts his own more homespun version: take a pallet and lay it down, then stand another one up behind it so you have something to stack against. Emmons braces the back wall with two-by-fours at 45-degree angles. For cover, he uses rubber roofing material over the top of the stack. You could use a sheet of plywood or corrugated galvanized roofing panels. Then you just stack the wood so that the “roof” over it has a pitch to it, allowing water to run off.
For free-standing piles, old timers use split logs layered in alternating directions to build pillars; the wood can then be stacked, bark side up, between the pillars. A sheet of galvanized metal weighted by rocks on top is the finishing touch.
In any stack, the green wood goes at the bottom and the driest at the top. A lot of wood is sold green, or freshly cut, according to the Cornell Cooperative Extension. That means as much as half the wood’s weight is water. All the wood you burn should have a moisture content below 20 percent: a higher amount means more smoke and less heat. Green wood will take at least six months to dry out. Cornell recommends getting wood a year before you’ll burn it.
Moisture meters are available for gauging the moisture content of wood. But those were invented in the 1920s. Why go the modern route when there are more traditional options? To know if your wood is green, the Cornell extension agency suggests, just knock two pieces together. Seasoned wood will produce a “crisp, solid sound.” Green wood, when knocked together, “will make a duller, muffled sound.”
“You’ll want to store the wood you need for a heating season times one and a half,” Emmons says. He aims to have wood left over at the end of the season to ensure he has some that’s very dry to start the next winter. When stored properly, firewood can last indefinitely.
By the way, Emmons says, chimney maintenance is important, too. “You need to get your chimney inspected and cleaned every year,” he says. “And you need to keep your stove clean.” If your stove isn’t functioning properly and smoke can’t escape through the chimney, then the carbon monoxide created has no place to go but inside your home. Carbon monoxide poisoning can be deadly, he warns.
We’ve covered it all: time and money, pests and poison. What are the benefits of heating with firewood? I asked Emmons.
“I’m something of a curmudgeon,” says Emmons, “and a traditionalist.” He’s a do-it-yourself kind of person. He keeps a shellfishing license and likes to fix things, and heating his house with firewood that he’s cut and split and stored carefully goes along with that.
“It has a certain intangible characteristic,” he says. “This sort of binding to the past. And it’s a cool thing for my kids to see.”
