One of the frequent comments about America from precolonial times right on through the 1840's was that any American frontiersman had more fuel available than a European nobleman.
I can relate to Kath a lot. In my case, the cleanup of the ranch is ongoing. I use the cleanup of down trees and branches to heat the house, thereby using less electricity and propane.
As you said, chemistry is chemistry.
We can either burn it and release carbon dioxide in the process, or we can let it rot as the bacterial degradation produces the same amount of carbon dioxide. Not. A. Dirty. Fuel. It's simply stoichiometry and mass balance. In one case we aver using other resources while the firewood produces something useful instead of the same carbon dioxide output through rotting without any side benefit.
The wind comes down from the Arctic. . . swirls around a bit. . . then settles - right here. . . where the Nation's forests FLOURISH beyond your wildest dreams.
BASE104 said: "It is also the dirtiest and most carbon intensive fuel on the planet."
While firewood is smoke and particulate intensive (dirty), it's not as carbon intensive as you think.
As was mentioned above, we can burn wood and release the carbon, or let it rot over 100 years and release the same carbon.
Compare that to oil-based heating: if it weren't for human heating needs, that oil, or natural gas would have remained underground and the carbon would have remained sequestered forever (or essentially forever).
Wood's dirty but it is not a carbon issue to anywhere near the same degree as oil and gas.
And, Kat, I agree that lots of firewood gives a sense of security, "warmth" ahead of time. Nice post.
1. Cut it
2. Haul it to the truck
3. Unload the truck
4. Split it
5. Stack it
6. Burn it
In North Carolina, you can get a Forest Products Permit for 20 buck which lets you gather 12 truckloads of downed wood from the National Forest. There a couple of spots nearby where they've been logging and the leftover--Chestnut Oak, Red Oak, Locust--is prime fuel.
Apparently if you split and let season for at least six months the woodsmoke is less of a pollutant. Don't know why.
Looks like about 45, 000 more people in Montana than San Jose.... they each have about 190% of the population of Montana's neighbor, Wyoming, the 50th state, population wise. I'm gonna guess that Montana has more trees than Wyo & San Jose and, WTF, 29 Palms, put together.
I own a forest. . . Seriously. . . OWN a forest. . . I protect it. . . thin it. . . leave it alone. . . remove the crumbles. . . chop them up. . . stack them nicely. . . and when it's cold. . . I put parts of it in this big cast iron box, in my house, and I catch them on fire. . . that's got to be the weirdest thing in the world!
BRING FLAMABLE MATERIALS INTO YOUR HOUSE AND CATCH THEM ON FIRE?
Somewhere, out there, somebody wrote a program depicting what will happen to our forests by 2038.
Supposedly, there will be a cataclysmic fire that will denude them.
We never should have protected them so well.
There aren't enough wildland firefighters in our midst to fight said conflagration.
We should be
Thinning
Thinning
Thinning
And nobody's thinning. . .
There aren't enough thinners. . . .
SOOOOOOOOOOOO. . . in the meantime. . . manage your own forests. . . think for yourselves. . . collect those volatile stumbling blocks, stack them nicely and take them inside. . . catch them on fire. . . and warm your soul before 2038 comes along and escalates the whole mess!
And. . . stay away from Montana. . . you'd hate it here!
Kath, and others, I have turned my thinking tremendously WRT logging.
I used to be as opposed as any, a real tree-hugger. I still love trees.
But they as I became a forest worker, I came to understand what our defense against all fire has done. Our forests are tremendously overloaded, TREMENDOUSLY. Each acre has 4 times or more the trees that it should have, weakening all the ones there due to the competition, and making them far more open to disease.....and the concentration greatly enhances crown fires which are the worst, but catastrophic fires in general.
I don't discount the possibility of the coming conflagration. The fire near Los Angeles was an eye-opener.
BRING FLAMABLE MATERIALS INTO YOUR HOUSE AND CATCH THEM ON FIRE?
And. . . I'm gonna add one more thing. . . for cry-y-y-y-y-ing out loud. . .
Being actively involved with heating your home might very well put you in the Hall of Flame. . . no, no, no. . . what I'm trying to say, here, is. . . . when you physically do the work and you feel where the heat comes from, you finally have the tools to control your consumption.
Hand-picking the buckskin Tams at my "secret spot" (helping the State Parks with 'fuel load management' and doing trail work at the same time). Also paper birch and Norway Maple that I scrounge whenever someone needs one of those weeds cut down. Significant 'cost' in terms of gas, time, and danger, but it's work I enjoy doing so that doesn't count. Go through about 4 1/2 cords in a winter. Keep the house toasty warm and don't pay the utility company except to heat the water.
There's a lot of propaganda regarding thinning forests to keep them healthy. That may be true in the dry Ponderosa forests where getting rid of the brush and dog-hair trees does reduce the low fuel load. I've seen it work, and it promotes 4-foot dbh forests with open park-like settings. The moist North Idaho forests, however, are designed to grow like crazy for 200 years until they get a summer like 1910 when all hell breaks loose and a few million acres of hemlock, fir, alder, red cedar go up in a conflagration. All that happened before there was any forest management, so that's that kind of forest's natural path.
Better to burn wood than to truck in fossil fuel to heat your home. Someone will always try to piss on your fire.
Here in BC we have so much beetle kill Pine, that eventually the coast will go up like a tinder box. I cut it, chop it , move it, burn it as my primary fuel source here in Princeton. My small contribution to reducing the available fuel for the inevitable big blaze.
We take it pretty seriously up here at Chain Lake, everyone has a five HP water pump beside the lake in anticipation of the inevitable. Most people misunderstand how fire spreads, the common belief is that it jumps from tree to tree, but most forest fires spread along the ground and travels tree to tree, via "fire ladders," the dead unpruned branches at the base of trees. We invited one of the commanders from the 2009 Kelowna Fire , to teach our community preventative practices and everyone here tries to be as fire preventive, pro active as possible.
Yeah we burn a lot of deadfall Pine Beetle Kill, every spring, better that than losing our whole community.
Apparently Chaz' dogs think that master is somewhat overdoing things in the "sticks to throw" department. Maybe Donald's border collie would be interested, though.
Trees that fall naturally do eventually rot, with some of the carbon getting back in the atmosphere. But much goes to add to the biomass of the forest.
Felling trees, chopping wood, making fires, and sitting and cooking by them are all high in the double plus good category.
One of the frequent comments about America from precolonial times right on through the 1840's was that any American frontiersman had more fuel available than a European nobleman.
Seems to ring true in 2012, as well. (But we better hurry up!)
I was told once by a taco whose word I trust implicitly, that because of an endangerd (?) beetle or something that lives in Manzanita, it is against the law to burn Manzanita in California.
do NOT have a fireplace, but would love to warm house that way--when we were kids, we had one, but used it on holidays, only...
my mom's sis, in ohio, however, before she died, would go out and cut
her own firewood (was 80, when she sadly died by falling through the ice in her pond) during a winter, that was not as cold as usual, so we suspect--judging by the winters there, now... :(
my twin buddies, they cut their own as well, and so their dad, when he helps, and he is in his 80's ...
sure hope WE get to enjoy firewood in our 80's, :)
me--i make outdoor eve fires, as chaz's idea... or daytime ones, just to enjoy... though much simpler set up :)
and any woodscraps i can get, ....
i sure enjoy your post here, it feels sooooooooooooo 'ekat'ish, :)
and 'outdoorish'....
thanks for the share... may be making a fire, tomorrow outside,
too, for me and patty ann marie....
That's a pretty wood burner. Mine in Mammoth was a 55 gallon drum with a little face plate cut into the front. It did have an electric fan that would pump all the heat off it and heat up the place really fast and a little burner on top to boil water in to help with humidity. I wonder where my photo of that thing went? I love splitting wood with those steel wedges and I mostly love the things you say in your posts.
Kinda like this. Kinda like all the rituals too.
Edit: Don't want to get into the rates of decay, carbon ... but maybe the world is generating too many people and not enough peopleness.
I've been wanting one of those for a while, but I can't find a barrel for a reasonable price. ( seems like I used to see them dumped all over the place, until I started looking for one. )
I dig splitting wood too! All the way into kindling. It's relaxing.
This stuff people burn in most western states is a bit of a cruel joke. I grew up with hardwoods.
I love splittin' and stackin' wood. Give me a pile of rounds and a maul and I'm good for a fall afternoon.
I remember when my dad got a splitter, I thought he was a quitter or something. Turns out he had reached the point where the time spent splitting + wear on his body equation made getting the splitter worth it.
Go far enough west, and you'll find people burning eucalyptus. I like eucalyptus. That's our hard wood. That, and orange wood. I don't like orange wood, though. It doesn't split well.
I just had some guys cut down my big pecan tree. THAT will be some good wood, when it dries. I'll probably have to get a smoker to take full advantage of it.
Beetle would isn't good for much other than burning; but it doesn't put out much heat. I leave the dead beetle trees (yellow pine) standing; so other insects and de-composers can feast. It is basically the same thing as putting bird feed out.
The beetles are long gone by the time you see any signs of damage. The beetle eggs can lay dormant in a tree for 10 years, so until entomology discovers a safe, natural remedy for pine beetles the environment is going to suffer. Pine Beetles have been a big problem in the south for decades. (We even have a local band called the Pine Beetles).
I harvest all of my wood from storm damage on my land and adjacent farms. I sell most of the oaks and keep the hickory for myself. Gathering of firewood is good, productive exercise; but I gave up the ax, maul and wedge 20 years ago due to rotator cuff problems. A low end mechanical splitter is much more efficient than a maul and wedge; but it takes some of the nostalgia away. (I don't look at my chainsaws that way).
Here is an amazing log splitter, not meant for a home user but someone who processes a lot of firewood. I am not sure how trouble free this is but it sure is cool. http://www.wimp.com/woodsplitter/
Quot I was told once by a taco whose word I trust implicitly, that because of an endangerd (?) beetle or something that lives in Manzanita, it is against the law to burn Manzanita in California. e Here
jaybro: you have been mis-informed.there are over 100 species of manzanita and only a few are endangered and none because of a beetle.
" Rarity and endemics
Some manzanita species are among the rarest plants in the world. The endemic Arctostaphylos hookeri ravenii (Presidio manzanita) is the most endangered and restricted plant in the mainland United States. In 1987 only one specimen remained, at a secret location in the Presidio of San Francisco National Historic Landmark District in San Francisco, California. This plant has since been successfully cloned.[3] Arctostaphylos franciscana (Franciscan Manzanita), a species native to San Francisco, had not been seen growing wild since 1947 until it was spotted growing in the Presidio of San Francisco in October, 2009.[1] Caltrans transplanted this specimen on January 23, 2010, to make way for the Doyle Drive Replacement Project.[4]"
i have gone to Fire Safe Council meetings and have heard all the discussions. the Forest Service even issued me a permit to cut manzanita on Forest Service land. i dont think they would do that if it was against the law.
Burning wood is considered carbon neutral - wood is just carbon, sequestered from the atmosphere by the tree as it grows. What goes in goes out, zero net effect.
Not. A. Dirty. Fuel. It's simply stoichiometry and mass balance.
Burning wood is considered carbon neutral - wood is just carbon, sequestered from the atmosphere by the tree as it grows. What goes in goes out, zero net effect.
Yes, burning wood is essentially carbon neutral, however it's very dirty in many ways.
When your stove is shut up to "simmer", high levels of carbon monoxide result. Hopefully not in your house. But CO running around loose in the atmosphere in small quantities isn't a problem.
A bigger problem is soot and particulate matter.
Known smog formers and carcinogens. Then there are the polyhyphenated aromatic hydrocarbons such as the alkenes, aldehydes etc. More nasties in the atmosphere. You've seen the creosote in your stove and chimney (you'd better clean your chimney yearly if you burn your stove a lot). This is the tar like residue of the aromatic hydrocarbons that didn't burn, nor go up in smoke.
Those of us who live in the forest or the urban-wildland interface do have to maintain our fire clearances. In California, it's The Law. So we have to clear trees and vegetation on a yearly basis (the durned things keep growing back). Chipping it and spreading it on the ground is the most ecological solution. At least where there's significant moisture in the air for most of the summer.
So it's a question of balance. I heat my office with well seasoned hardwood, mostly Black Oak, some Madrone and Live Oak. Never Doug Fir or Bay Laurel which don't burn cleanly. There's no other source of heat in the building.
Occasionally heat the house with the wood stove, like yesterday when it was snowing and we had friends over. Keep a supply of firewood for the house for power outages when it's our only heat.
Put in a propane forced air furnace a few years ago. So this is definitely NOT carbon neutral as it's burning sequestered hydrocarbons from hundreds of millions of years ago. But it's "clean" otherwise.
Here's what it SHOULD look like out there. . . but I'm really not complaining. . . it's kinda cool not having to shovel a lot. . . the surrounding peaks (Northern Rockies, et al) are plastered.
I made some funny comment on my Great niece's FB page and some of her friends asked WTF I was. . . the reply was. . ."Oh, just my GreatAuntKath. . . she lives in a log cabin in Montana. . . AND HEATS WITH WOOD!"
:-)
As normal as it seems to me, compared to TheNeimanMarcusLifeStyle, I must seem really, really strange!
There are 2 people in the world who can do that right. . . you and Tracy (Eric Gabriel's wife). . . I can do it about 1/100 of the time. . . and when it works I laugh so hard, I wreck it!
Burning wood is carbon neutral (minus the fossil fuel carbon you release to cut and move it, of course.)
That carbon was recently (within the last 100 years) removed from the atmosphere. Putting it right back out there is a huge huge improvement over using gas or coal-fired electric heat, which takes carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago and releases it in the atmosphere.
On the other pollutants, it's pretty dirty, tho most modern wood stoves have emissions systems to cut way back on that.
This Jotul (from Norway) is pretty high tech. . . I bought the aftermarket combustion air intake manifold for it and it's plumbed to bring that air in from under the cabin.
The foot pedal on it is really cool. . . you walk up to it with an armload of wood, step on the pedal and it opens the top . . . then you stoke it, without having to put the wood down to deal with the door. . . VERY COOL. Plus the old dad who built this cabin put the return register for the forced air heating/A/C system at the top of the 2nd story. . . so all I have to do is turn on the fan, it sucks the hot air off the ceiling and distributes it through the ducting to the rest of the house.
LOVE IT!
It's a frikken mess, though. . . I have to be pretty anal about it or the greatroom can look like the barn, if I'm not careful!
Back there in the corner is a really cool handmade stove, It's the guts from an old water heater. It lived, for decades in Mammoth (as did I) and it came to Montana with me. . . it's the perfect heat source for the garage.
eKat
you don't have NEARLY enough crap in that garage! Fence off a corner for your stash and rent the rest to a homeless guy in return for splitting and hauling your firewood.
you don't have NEARLY enough crap in that garage! Fence off a corner for your stash and rent the rest to a homeless guy in return for splitting and hauling your firewood.
Yeah. . . I'm sorta not into stacks of crap. . . less is more. . . but. . . I sorta like the idea of bringin' a "hand" on board. . . this place is a lot of work!
Actually his strength was not in the gun, but in his intellect. A knight without armor. The knight - "It's an attack piece, the most versatile on the board. It can move eight different ways, over barriers, and [is] always unexpected."
Note he says "versatile" not powerful. Everybody knows, or will know, the queen is the most powerful. And, this show was way too advanced for the late fifties.
^
In another episode from the first season, "The Singer", Hey Boy responds to a stranger who addresses him with "Hey you!" by annoyedly responding that it is "Hey Boy", and not "Hey you".
This old thread. . . perfect timing. . . I just finished stocking the shop/gym with firewood for the winter. Life Fitness seems to think that machine needs to be warmer than 31 below zero to operate properly!
TGT, if you are not being sarcastic in posting that I take back all the bad things I've said about you over the years. Well, maybe not everything, but there is much to choose from.
Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life doing things completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don't like doing. Which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
I've completely changed carriers at about ten year intervals, because it wasn't that much fun any more and time to explore a new challenge.
My problem with the "progressives" is that they seek to demonize those that pursue their dreams and happen to produce something that enough other people also see as valuable and become wealthy in the process.
All these pictures and comments remind me of two things I loved about living in the wood in the upper midwest.
1. Bottom trimming the fir stands. Every winter, we'd get out the pole saws, warm sorel boots, heavy irish sweaters, a large thermos of coffee and brandy, and cut those branches off up to 18'. Stack 'em and move on to the next stand. After a heavy snowfall, it'd be quiet and spacious like a cathedral in the stands. A great way to spend an afternoon with folks you love. Wait until someone was right under one of the pines and hit it with a pole, and the snow would come down all over them. :-) Then run.
2. We replaced the oil-burning furnace for the wood furnace (central heating). Other than having to get up on the middle of the night at some point to throw logs into it and cleaning it soundly once a year, the wood burning furnace was the best system. It provided the most consistent and stable heat, and we got to use all of the fallen from the penultimate year.
I am actually for nuclear energy. From the Sun. But I burn wood that I either buy or have harvested from our small plot of land. Peat is 'big' here in Ireland, but peat is not sustainable. Bad choice nowadays. And coal as well.
Actually, I was not being flippant. I used to be totally, totally, against nuclear power. But if we can harness it (and dispose of it) in a safe, VERY SAFE, way, it seems the way of the future.
Unless somebody knows where I can obtain dilithium crystals.
Let us know!