Tractors and wood! Show your pics

[WinterDeere]

Huh? Black walnut is terrific firewood. Most firewood BTU charts show it above 20 MBTU/cord, better than ash, cherry, some oaks and maples.

There's a lot more to "terrific firewood" than you can get from reading some online BTU charts.

We average around 10 full cords per year, adding supplemental heat to our too-large and too-old house, thru a pair of Blaze King wood stoves. We burn mostly red oak and hickory that I source from two local properties, although we've been splitting a lot of ash the last few years, thanks to EAB. All of our wood is dried under roof, in open-sided sheds, for 3-4 years before burning.

Black walnut makes up the majority of the trees on our property, and I would estimate maybe 30-40 cords of the last 150 cords I've burned have been black walnut, so I have a good bit of experience in burning it. Maybe more than most will accumulate in a full lifetime.

Its total BTU output isn't terrible, but it's in the lower half of what I'm willing to burn, it's really a waste of your time if you have access to oak or hickory... both of which are massively-prevalent around here. If you're seeing "some oaks" that are worse than black walnuts on your BTU charts, and we assume the chart isn't just dead-wrong (likely), then it must be some rare variety of oak we never see around here. Do be sure all charts are comparing the BTU output at equal moisture contents, as oak takes very long to dry (3-4 years in most climates where one would be burning it), and so it's very easy for one to collect bad data from insufficiently-dried oak.

What likely gives Black Walnut a little boost in BTU content is its high resin content. Resinous woods generally give a good blast of BTU early in the burn, but struggle to maintain heat output over a longer burn cycle, in comparison to less resinous woods of similar total BTU content.

BTU's aside, my real problem with black walnut is the absolutely obscene amount of ash it produces. When you are trying to heat a home with wood, and filling one load after the next into a few wood stoves that never go out October into April, ash accumulation is a constant tedium. Burning most high-BTU hardwoods, I have to empty ash from each of my stoves once per week. But as soon as I switch to black walnut, I need to step that up to more than twice per week.

I will toss black walnut aside, ten times out of ten, when there is oak, hickory, or even ash available. I don't get enough Cherry or Maple to really have an opinion on them, among the woods you mention in your comparison.

 

[deezler]

There's a lot more to "terrific firewood" than you can get from reading some online BTU charts.

BTU's aside, my real problem with black walnut is the absolutely obscene amount of ash it produces. When you are trying to heat a home with wood, and filling one load after the next into a few wood stoves that never go out October into April, ash accumulation is a constant tedium. Burning most high-BTU hardwoods, I have to empty ash from each of my stoves once per week. But as soon as I switch to black walnut, I need to step that up to more than twice per week.

I will toss black walnut aside, ten times out of ten, when there is oak, hickory, or even ash available. I don't get enough Cherry or Maple to really have an opinion on them, among the woods you mention in your comparison.

I have a limited amount of oaks on my property here in southern michigan, they are very robust and beautiful trees so I would never dare cut one down on purpose for firewood. The Walnuts on the other hand.... abundant and detrimental to my garden/planting areas (juglone poison).

The obscene ash is from the thick bark. If you have walnut with no bark, the ash is no different than cherry or maple, in my experience.

I'll die on the hill: black walnut is terrific firewood.

By the way, I built my house to be efficient and tight, with passive solar gain, and we burn just 6-8 FACE cords of firewood per winter. If the sun comes out, sometime can skip a day in the woodstove and still hold above 65F inside. So yeah my tolerance for ash is probably higher than yours, I scoop it out once a week, takes a month to fill a little 3-gallon pail. NBD at all.

10 full cords per year? Why not you know, improve your house. Thats a crazy amount of effort.

 

[deezler]

SR

I think you post images on photobucket, no? I can never see any of your pics (work firewall blocks them).

I was wrong about any oak species being below black walnut though, I retract that one.

 

[Sawyer Rob]

I think you post images on photobucket, no? I can never see any of your pics (work firewall blocks them).

I was wrong about any oak species being below black walnut though, I retract that one.

NO

SR

 

[WinterDeere]

I have a limited amount of oaks on my property here in southern michigan, they are very robust and beautiful trees so I would never dare cut one down on purpose for firewood. The Walnuts on the other hand.... abundant and detrimental to my garden/planting areas (juglone poison).

Yeah, walnut trees are not great yard trees. Some things won't grow under them, they get their leaves last in spring, and lose them first in the fall. Although lack of leaf clean-up is one bonus, since the walnut leaves all seem to blow away into the woods, on their own.

But with regard to which we have available to burn with least impact, here it's the opposite of your situation. Walnuts are our yard trees, losing them would really change the character of the property. But Hurricane Sandy brought down damn near a lifetime supply of oak (hundreds of cords between the few properties I cut), and a tornado in 2019 hit a large property I manage that's mostly hickory. So that's been the majority of my burning the last dozen years, but now EAB-kill ash trees are starting to dominate my stacks.

The obscene ash is from the thick bark. If you have walnut with no bark, the ash is no different than cherry or maple, in my experience.

Interesting! I never peel the bark, so you may be right there. I manually transfer my wood from the shed to my wagon, and if bark falls off then, I toss it into the woods or the fire pit. But most Walnut bark tends to stay attached, even after 3-4 years of drying, so it usually goes into the stove, here.

10 full cords per year? Why not you know, improve your house. Thats a crazy amount of effort.

Our heat load really isn't that terrible, considering the size and construction. I'm heating about 7800 sq.ft. of our 8100 sq.ft. total, with 60 windows, half of which were installed in 1775. We also have 13 exterior doors, the oldest dating to 1734, and a few more from the 1775 expansion.

Even if the house were better than average new construction, size and window/door count dictate a high heat load. Our wood usage actually only makes up part of our total heating fuel supply, we also burn 1000 gallons of oil, plus two heat pumps, two propane zones, and four zones of resistive heating (some of our bathrooms).

That said, I've used FLIR photography to compare our 250 year old windows to the modern 400-series Anderson's installed in our carriage barn and one new addition. It's no surprise the old windows actually perform better than the latest, in terms of radiation losses, when a storm window is installed. There's just no beating the 3-4 inch air gap of a traditional double-hung with storm, with the 5mm gap used in modern double-pane. And being an all-stone house, draft losses are minimal, excepting around our very old doors. But conduction losses thru the stone walls are absolutely massive, the plaster on our exterior walls holds around 53F all winter, so we're always heating against that constant and near-infinite load.

I've seen too many old houses ruined by ignorant owners, thinking they're making "improvements", only to go from windows that last 100 years between rebuilds, to Anderson crap that requires full-replacement every 20-30 years. I've also seen folks cover original interior plaster with framed-in walls and insulation, only to have terrible mold problems, in addition to shrinking every room in the house by the thickness of the framed-in wall cavities, and lose the character of the original window boxes and sill details. It's always such a shame to see the historical significance of a pre-Revolutionary era house ruined by a owner with good intentions, but bad information or assumptions.

Whenever talking about old houses, there's always the argument of "original", since they're always expanding and changing. Our house was built in four phases, 1734 - 1995. We just try to keep the parts in each of those four phases original to their initial construction.

 

[wolc123]

Yeah, walnut trees are not great yard trees. Some things won't grow under them, they get their leaves last in spring, and lose them first in the fall. Although lack of leaf clean-up is one bonus, since the walnut leaves all seem to blow away into the woods, on their own.

But with regard to which we have available to burn with least impact, here it's the opposite of your situation. Walnuts are our yard trees, losing them would really change the character of the property. But Hurricane Sandy brought down damn near a lifetime supply of oak (hundreds of cords between the few properties I cut), and a tornado in 2019 hit a large property I manage that's mostly hickory. So that's been the majority of my burning the last dozen years, but now EAB-kill ash trees are starting to dominate my stacks.


Interesting! I never peel the bark, so you may be right there. I manually transfer my wood from the shed to my wagon, and if bark falls off then, I toss it into the woods or the fire pit. But most Walnut bark tends to stay attached, even after 3-4 years of drying, so it usually goes into the stove, here.


Our heat load really isn't that terrible, considering the size and construction. I'm heating about 7800 sq.ft. of our 8100 sq.ft. total, with 60 windows, half of which were installed in 1775. We also have 13 exterior doors, the oldest dating to 1734, and a few more from the 1775 expansion.

Even if the house were better than average new construction, size and window/door count dictate a high heat load. Our wood usage actually only makes up part of our total heating fuel supply, we also burn 1000 gallons of oil, plus two heat pumps, two propane zones, and four zones of resistive heating (some of our bathrooms).

That said, I've used FLIR photography to compare our 250 year old windows to the modern 400-series Anderson's installed in our carriage barn and one new addition. It's no surprise the old windows actually perform better than the latest, in terms of radiation losses, when a storm window is installed. There's just no beating the 3-4 inch air gap of a traditional double-hung with storm, with the 5mm gap used in modern double-pane. And being an all-stone house, draft losses are minimal, excepting around our very old doors. But conduction losses thru the stone walls are absolutely massive, the plaster on our exterior walls holds around 53F all winter, so we're always heating against that constant and near-infinite load.

I've seen too many old houses ruined by ignorant owners, thinking they're making "improvements", only to go from windows that last 100 years between rebuilds, to Anderson crap that requires full-replacement every 20-30 years. I've also seen folks cover original interior plaster with framed-in walls and insulation, only to have terrible mold problems, in addition to shrinking every room in the house by the thickness of the framed-in wall cavities, and lose the character of the original window boxes and sill details. It's always such a shame to see the historical significance of a pre-Revolutionary era house ruined by a owner with good intentions, but bad information or assumptions.

Whenever talking about old houses, there's always the argument of "original", since they're always expanding and changing. Our house was built in four phases, 1734 - 1995. We just try to keep the parts in each of those four phases original to their initial construction.

Wow, that’s a big old house and that’s a lot of wood to heat it. There used to be a big old farmhouse on our place, built by my great great grandfather in the late 1800’s. It was lost to a fire from grandpas wood stove in 1980. He put in the wood stove to cut the heating expense, but it cost him the house.

They replaced it with a well insulated 1200 sq ft ranch house, that my wife and I added another 800 sq ft to when we started having kids. I heat all 2000 sq ft comfortably with an average of 6 face cords per winter, and we are way up
North, near the Canadian border.

I also have been burning mostly ash for the last 10 years or so, when the EAB started. I’m starting to get real sick of that and will be very happy when it’s all gone. Excessive ashes to clean out is my biggest complaint.



How I miss the days when we burned mostly oak, cherry, and maple. I still pounce on those whenever there is storm damage in our roughly 50 acres of woods.

I also season all of our firewood for at least (3) years prior to burning, in our 24 face cord capacity woodshed. It’s just about full now. There’s still room for about 1-1/2 face cord on the far end in case the ground freezes up and I get ambitious later this winter.

I’ve been making most of my firewood in the summer, the last few years, because the ground hasn’t been freezing good enough to prevent rutting damage. Fortunately, just (6) face cords don’t take all that long.

 

[John_Mc]

I think you post images on photobucket, no? I can never see any of your pics (work firewall blocks them).

I was wrong about any oak species being below black walnut though, I retract that one.

That chart Sawyer rob posted is one of the best firewood BTU charts I have come across. They made a point of assembling it from sources which stated the moisture content, so they could be sure they were comparing apples to apples. I thought we could attach PDF files in this forum, but I guess not. If you PM me your email address, I'll send it along to you.

 

[WinterDeere]

All this talk of wood got me into the mood for moving some, which I did for a short while before sunset tonight. I usually move 1 cord to a smaller "shed" located on high ground near my barn, at the beginning of each heating season. I pull from this when the ground is too soggy to get down to my main wood lot, during heating season. Then I park 1/2 cord in my wagon, on a patio outside my walk-out basement door, which is dry under a porch overhang. This is the wood I use everyday.

Snapped a few quick photos this evening, while loading the wagon:



So, the crib I'm pulling from was split and stacked in 2020, probably from logs gathered from the 2019 tornado, since there was a lot of hickory in that stack. There were also a few random bits of walnut clearly from my own yard, as I'd never haul walnut home from another property. After filling a wagon with mostly hickory, the walnut feels like balsa wood, paper-weight light!

That chart Sawyer rob posted is one of the best firewood BTU charts I have come across. They made a point of assembling it from sources which stated the moisture content, so they could be sure they were comparing apples to apples. I thought we could attach PDF files in this forum, but I guess not. If you PM me your email address, I'll send it along to you.

It's from the Sweep's Library, I believe. The guy who ran it used to post to another forum that I used to watch, but I think he may have passed. It's now hosted at hearth.com, with subsequent obnoxious advertising. Anyway, here's the direct link:

Sweep's Library - Firewood Heat Value Comparison Charts

Firewood heat value chart

www.hearth.com

 

[John_Mc]

It's from the Sweep's Library, I believe. The guy who ran it used to post to another forum that I used to watch, but I think he may have passed. It's now hosted at hearth.com, with subsequent obnoxious advertising.

I had a nice exchange with that guy years ago, when I contact him for permission to repost that chart. (He was fine with it as long as I included the web link. He also appreciate my asking, since most ignore the copy right and just copy and paste it.)

 

[kozal01]

Now that the weather is cooler I’ve been cutting up all the wood I got from the summer storms into firewood lengths. Tractor of course is a great help moving stuff around. I’d love a grapple someday but for now a chain and this thing (not sure what it’s called) works pretty well.