The importance of Seasoning Firewood

Now that the burning season for most of has finished, we have to start thinking about seasoning firewood for the seasons to come.  Hopefully you already have your firewood split and stacked for the coming burning season.  In a perfect world you would already have 2 years of firewood stacked.  This is because some wood can take around 3 years to be ready to burn.

Dangers of not seasoning firewood

Many dangers can result in burning wet wood.  This will create more creosote in your chimney.  That is a fact, wet wood equals a dirty chimney.  A dirty chimney puts you at a high risk of a chimney fire.  Having unseasoned firewood means you have too much water in the wood.  This also means you will not get as hot of a burn as you would like to in your wood stove, causing o to waste more wood than you would have to to heat your home.  The glass on your stove also gets lots of creosote build up, taking away from the ascetics of a real fire.

One sign that your wood is too wet is that when it burns it is smokey.  The best way to know if your wood is dry enough is to buy a moisture meter.  Moisture content should be 20% or less.  If it is much higher than that, your firewood needs to be dried.  It is necessary to burn dry wood in any type of appliance.

So basically if you haven’t already started collecting your wood for this coming winter do it now.  Seasoning firewood may take around 3 years for some wood, so start early and save yourself from the risk of a chimney fire.

Check out this video on showing you an interesting way how to stack firewood and start seasoning firewood: