Top 10 Tips on How to Stack Firewood
When freshly cut, firewood has a very high moisture content (between 40% and 60%) which can cause problems when it comes time to burn it. Wet wood is hard to light, smokey when burning, can contribute to creosote build up in chimneys and is heavy to handle. Seasoning firewood reduces the moisture content dramatically (down to 15% to 20% by weight) and turns any cut timber into first class fuel for your combustion stove.
Green hardwood should be quartered before stacking in a well ventilated location.
Firewood just dumped in a heap won't dry and it won't burn well. Rain will run down and soak into cut ends while ground moisture will migrate up and soak into spongy inner bark.
Build your woodpile on a base that will prevent bottom rot — evidenced by streaks of yellow mold or white fruiting bodies of fungus on the ground course of (ruined) wood.
To support ends of piles, you can use a standing tree, a fence post, or any other found support. At free ends, build stable, square log cribs by alternating courses of north-south logs with east-west.
Build in as much air as you can, using irregularities and odd-shaped logs to create cross-stack channels for drying air. Always stack splits bark side up. Bark is designed to keep water out of the living tree and it will continue to shed moisture in the woodpile.
To encourage air to move through channels in the stack, orient sticks so that the cut ends face the direction of prevailing wind or air movement.
Keep horizontal courses as even and level as possible. In a double row, facing tiers dip down in the middle in a shallow V shape so the faces lean on one another for mutual support.
Unless you have a mechanical log splitter or firewood processor, splitting firewood down to size is likely to be a big task. Firewood dries and burns much more efficiently if it is split into smaller pieces very soon after it is cut. Smaller pieces of firewood have a larger surface area through which to dry so your logs can go from wet dry much more rapidly.
