Start a Warm Fire With Smart Wood Choices

If you have a fireplace, fire pit or wood-burning stove, you’ve probably noticed that the cost of firewood has more than doubled in the past 10 years.

We don’t exactly live at the edge of the forest and, due to issues with invasive insects, the movement of firewood has come under regulations that can require kiln-dried wood to be used if it’s been transported more than 50 miles. This can make that cozy fire a tad more expensive.

Heating with wood on Long Island simply isn’t economical anymore. Nonetheless, you need to know your wood, your fireplace and your wood stove no matter how frequently, or infrequently, you use it.

First, some bad news. A fireplace is no way to heat a home. Just ask anyone who lived in the 18th century. This is detailed in Joyce E. Chaplin’s wonderful book, “The Franklin Stove,” which was a fascinating read. No matter the price of petroleum-based fuels, the fact remains that in most instances, a fireplace ends up cooling 95 percent of your house while heating only 5 percent. This is because that roaring fire needs air for combustion and it’s just sucking it in from every crack and pinhole in your house’s walls, windows and vents, unless your fireplace has an air feed directly from outside.

Even with glass doors and some modern gizmos, fireplaces are inherently inefficient. Warm and cozy in front of them? Yes. Great during and after that Thanksgiving dinner? Yes. Romantic? Yes. But as a method of heating more than one small room? Doubtful.

Wood-burning stoves are much more efficient, especially those built in the past decade. However, they still can’t beat the efficiency of modern gas and oil furnaces, and geothermal. But for those who insist on burning wood, even for just a few nights a year, please read on.

A fireplace or wood-burning stove can be a killer and a home wrecker without the proper attention, as well as following a few simple rules for safety. One dead squirrel or a bird’s nest that has innocently been deposited in your chimney can result in smoke damage at the very least and a chimney fire that, at the most, can not only leave you with a soot- and smoke-darkened house, but possibly no house at all.

If you haven’t had a fire in your fireplace for several years, the very least that you need to do is open the flue, look up from the fire box and try to see daylight. This does not give you any insurance that there are no obstructions, but it will at least let you know that there is some path for smoke to travel upward and not inward. The best thing to do, of course, is to call a competent — as in, bonded and/or certified and insured — chimney sweep to give the chimney a once over or cleaning. That done, you will have some security, but not completely.

If you burn the wrong kind of wood in your fireplace or stove — let’s say pine — or if the wood you’re burning is not properly aged and dried (a year is best), you are again putting yourself at risk. While some literature says that the occasional burning of pine is okay (and they burn plenty of it down South), most experts will tell you that because of the high pitch and resin content, using it as firewood can result in creosote buildup in your chimney lining.

This creosote accumulates each time you build a fire, layer over layer. Then, one night, you light a particularly hot fire and the creosote ignites. The chimney starts to roar like a jet engine and before you know it, the chimney lining cracks, the fire leaks out into the wood framing of the house, and your house is on fire. In many cases, the only thing that survives is the chimney.

To be safe, don’t burn pine or other evergreens, and don’t burn wood that isn’t dry. Easily said, but how do you know when wood is properly dried? If you are cutting your own wood and if the logs are more than 8 inches in diameter, they need to be split. Unsplit logs can take up to three times as long to dry as split logs. If split, you can have burnable wood in as little as three months, but to be sure, split wood should age for a year before burning.

You can accelerate the curing of firewood by splitting it and letting it dry under a simple lean-to type of structure. It can have three sides and a roof, or just a roof, but the trick is to have it about 8 inches above the last row of wood so that air is always circulating and moisture is always evaporating. You can further accelerate the drying process by making the roof out of 4 mil clear plastic, but again, the plastic should not sit on the wood. Rather, the plastic needs to be above the wood so that the air moves freely out of the structure. This allows solar energy to penetrate into the pile and speed up drying while still keeping rain and snow off it. No matter what you do, don’t just take a tarp and throw it over the wood. This will effectively trap moisture and slow or stop the drying. You are better off with no cover at all instead of a tarp.

Unseasoned wood can contain 35 to 95 percent water, and burning wood like this reduces its heat value by 50 percent as it goes up in steam. By using the accelerated or traditional method of drying, in three to 12 months you can get 100 percent of the wood’s heat value.

If you are after the most pleasing aroma from your fire, try to find some apple, cherry or hickory to mix in with other hard woods. The strongest flame and heat value will come from apple, ironwood, white oak, locust and hickory. These are followed by maple, beech, ash and walnut. Avoid pine, spruce, hemlock, fir, basswood, poplar and other softwoods. There’s also a lot of ash around and while it burns fast and hot, its British thermal unit value for heating is rather low.

When you are buying firewood, you can get as little as a bundle at the supermarket all the way up to a cord from a nursery, tree care company or firewood dealer. No matter whom you buy from, though, be sure you know if the wood is dry and how long ago it was split. The wood should feel light, not heavy with moisture, and the ends should have radial splits in them to indicate cracking from dryness.

You may also want to ask about the origin of the wood. It’s very unlikely that you are going to find top-quality firewood that has been cut on Long Island. Most of the better firewood is trucked in from Pennsylvania, upstate New York or New England, and you’ll pay a premium. But remember that while this imported firewood will cost more, it will burn longer.

Expect to pay as much as $400 for a full cord of dry firewood and more for kiln-dried wood. Consider this, though: A full cord of white oak has the same heating potential as 232 gallons of fuel oil. If by some miracle you could get that oak delivered for, let’s say, $350, it looks like a good deal against the oil, which may run you $580 for the same heat value.

But wait, there’s more to it. The problem is that because of the inherent inefficiency of burning wood — at a maximum of 65 to 70 percent efficiency — oil and gas can still come out better, though not nearly as pleasing to the soul.

A full cord of wood measures 8 feet long by 4 feet wide by 4 feet deep. A face cord is 4 feet by 8 feet by 16 inches. Have the wood stacked away from the house to prevent any insects that may be hiding in the wood from visiting, and raise the wood on a pair of parallel two-by-fours to keep rodents from nesting under the pile.

Cover only the top few rows of the stack with a dark tarp. This will provide you with a constant supply of dry wood. If you use an opaque or clear plastic tarp, moisture will accumulate under it as the sun hits it and you’ll always have damp wood on top. Properly dried wood absorbs very little moisture unless it’s thoroughly soaked, so the sides need little or no protection.

For those of you who may want to rough it, a wood splitter can be rented for about $100 a day if you have trees to cut and a chain saw. A few years ago, my son and I spent six hours splitting oak, hickory and black birch and, by the end, we’d split two cords. That wood then had to be stacked and dried, and we wouldn’t burn it for another year. It’s hard work and the wood is free, but my back aches. However, the glowing warmth of the fire in the stove beats the flame inside the boiler by a mile.

If you know a wood burner and you’re looking for a holiday gift, drop some hints to see if they might be interested in a wood moisture meter. It’s a great little tool to have, easy to use and it will keep your wood safer to burn. Amazon has a general moisture meter like the one I use and it’s under $40.

Keep warm, keep safe and keep growing.