It's always best to shop for firewood before you need it. Sometimes you can find great deals in the spring and summer, before people are thinking about cool weather and warming their home. Good places to find postings of wood for sale are: Your local newspaper's classified ads. Grocery store, church or post office bulletin boards. Signs posted around the neighborhood.
Most firewood is sold in cords, face cords, ricks or truckloads.
It takes 8 to 12 months to dry (season) wood for burning so unless you have wood on hand already you will want to purchase dry wood. Dry wood burns longer, cleaner and produces greater heat. Unseasoned wood creates a potentially dangerous creosote buildup in your chimney.
When shopping around for wood keep in mind that hardwood is going to burn up to twice as long as softwood. So just because a cord of softwood might be cheaper doesn't mean you are getting a good deal. Softwood is effective for kindling or mixing with hardwood but hardwood will burn longer, tends to burn cleaner and will produce more heat. Examples of softwood: Pine, Fir, Cedar. Examples of hardwood: Oak, Ash, Madrona.
You will want to store wood about 4 inches off the ground. Any wood on the ground will collect insects and rot more quickly. You will also want to keep it covered from rain and snow.
Wood against the side of your house could attract wood loving insects like termites who will start nibbling on your house. It also keeps air from circulating around the wood which will help keep it dry.
This isn't a hard and fast rule. You can store dry wood for more than a year but at some point it will start to rot and collect tons of insects. Make sure to use your oldest wood first.
While it's nice to have a lot of wood on hand in the house, you inevitably bring in insects even if you clean off the wood. So don't bring more than a days worth of wood into your home at a time. A wood pile in your house is basically a guest room for little critters.
Do you have any more tips to add?
This page contains the following solutions.
Re-purpose your Igloo Shaped Dog house for storing some firewood. Our dog refused to use the Dog-Loo we bought her years ago. I got the idea to store a stash of firewood in it to keep it dry and easily accessible by our back door.
Keeping firewood elevated is so important. It not only keeps it safe from rain and the damp ground, but all the bugs and critters are less likely to move in. By keeping our wood off the ground, we have found that snakes are less likely to crawl in too.
After reading the tip for buying firewood, I wanted to remind you how to keep the firewood "from going bad". The wood needs to be elevated off the ground and kept covered.
Get 4 wooden shipping pallets and two 8 foot steel fence posts. Lay two of the pallets on the ground away from the house.
Here are the questions asked by community members. Read on to see the answers provided by the ThriftyFun community.
How do you build a storage shed for firewood?
By N. Fallert
