A Cord of Firewood

[Michigan Swamp Buck]

Perhaps this thread should be called everything you never knew about a cord of firewood.

First of all, let's avoid any confusion about a full cord of firewood and a face cord (aka a Rik).

A full cord is a stack of wood that measures 8 feet long by 4 feet high and 4 feet wide.

A face cord, also know as a a Rik, is one third of a full cord and normally measures 8 feet long, 4 feet high and 16" wide.

Technically this pile of fire wood could be a solid block of wood, or nearly so if you had a cord of firewood that was cut like lumber. However, a cord of firewood could be a stacked pile of logs cut to 8 foot, or more normally logs cut to 16" (that maybe be split).

A piece of fire wood could be cut to 16" or as much as 24" with the shorter pieces for wood stoves and fireplaces and the longer ones for outdoor wood stoves. Regardless of the length of the cut wood, it has to conform to the dimensions of 8X4X4 to be a full cord of wood.

Now, most fire places and indoor wood stoves are designed for 16" pieces of firewood, and so most cords are based on pieces cut to 16" (incidentally most general purpose chainsaws have 16" to 18" bar lengths).

The 16" length log or split piece of firewood stacked to 8' long and 4' high is one third of a cord. Three rows of 16" pieces stacked this way equals a cord and is the most normal way a cord is cut and stacked.

Now a typical wheelbarrow has a width that is around 16" and will fill with 16" pieces of firewood to a stack that roughly equals a 16" cube. 3 wheelbarrows tall is 4 feet and 6 WBs long is 8 feet, so one third of a cord (aka face cord or rik) equals 18 WBs and a full cord equals 54 WBs.

Now if your pieces of fire wood are split in around 6" diameter, a wheelbarrow will hold around 24 pieces or three arm loads of around 8 pieces each or around 432 arm loads per cord.

With my little indoor wood stove, I will burn 2 wheelbarrows of firewood in a 24 hour period on the coldest days, or around 60 WBs a month, so a little over a full cord. Usually it is less.

I can cut around 7 wheelbarrows of 16" pieces on a single tank of gas in the chainsaw that will last me just under an hour of cutting. In about two hours I can cut enough wood to last a week, of course you can add a couple more hours moving and stacking it. That means after around 8 hours of cutting and that much more time moving and stacking, I have a full cord of wood. I burn an average of 6 cords per season that adds up to close to 100 hours cutting, moving and stacking fire wood or around 12 eight hour work days.

For around two week's worth of work days I can have heat for the entire winter. I haven't included the hour each day I take doing more splitting, moving and stacking wood into the house, but I consider that a daily chore, rain, snow or shine.

My open 8' pickup bed won't hold a full cord if tightly stacked but I think it holds more like half a cord loosely stacked.

[Bally002]

An enlightening read.  Never considered a 'cord'.

I cut and split wood here throughout winter for ourselves and sell to customers.  The wood is mostly dry, eucalypts such as Grey Gum, Red Gum, Iron bark, Spotted Gum, Stringy Bark, Blood Wood and some what we call Black/Grey Box. All above hardness of 5, heavy and strong, hot, slow burning.

Customers won't accept soft woods.  They burn hot and too quick. Easy to split though.  I have a lot of "Hoop Pine"  A soft wood. Large logs but only use is for outside fireplaces.  Good hot crackling fire.

Sale measurements are by cubic meter (cube) cut 12, 14 and 16 inch and the smaller the length makes it a little more costly due to extra cutting, splitting and loading.  A 'cube' fits neatly in the back of my utility truck (pickup) or my trailer takes 2 'cubes'.

My fireplace takes 16 inch and 1 barrow load of hardwood lasts all night and I stoke it up the next morning.  Customer fire places are generally 12 and 14 inch although I have cut and split 6 to 8 inch for pot belly type stoves. (Time consuming).

It keeps me busy and I have several chainsaws and a hydraulic log splitter and will spend a couple of days out on the selection dragging up logs, cutting and splitting.  Getting a bit too old to do it during summer months as the heat gets to me.

Thanks for educating me with regards to a cord of wood.  I'll get around to the workings of how many 'cubes' make a 'cord'.

Kind regards,

Bally

[Ninurta]

A "cord" is 3.67 "cubes"

I have 2 chimneys on this house, one for the house and one for the kitchen, but the stovepipe outlets were covered years ago during a refinishing of the wall paneling, so no wood stoves in the house. I'd have to relocate the flue holes, cut them open, and clean the chimney of decades of bird and bee nests.

Years ago when I was growing up, all of our heat was wood or coal. I designed a wood stove for the living area that was a monster, and dad built it out of 1/4" sheet steel. We had both a wood cooking stove and a pot-bellied stove in the kitchen, but never used them at the same time - that would have gotten hot enough to run us out of the house.

That stove dad built was pretty efficient. Too efficient in the beginning. I had designed it with 3 baffle plates at the top to to retain the heat as the smoke navigated the baffles, but it put too much of the heat into the house, and cooled the smoke before getting to the chimney too much. That allowed creosote to build up in the chimney pretty fast, making it a chimney fire hazard. To control that, we occasionally pulled the pipe out and set the chimney on fire intentionally, to have a controlled fire before it got built up enough to be dangerous.

After we'd burn the chimney out, I'd climb onto the roof with a spear-shaped contraption we made by welding two coal mine roof bolts together and then welding a 4-way blade on the end of that to knock out the crud from the chimney, and we'd clean the ash out at the flue inside the house.

Eventually, dad cut one of the baffle plates shorter to allow the smoke to escape faster and take some of the heat with it, and we mitigated that creosote build-up problem that way. Didn't have to fire it and clean it as often that way. Before it was lined with fire brick, that stove weighed in around 300 pounds. I forget how much the fire brick for it weighed.

 It had no ash grate, just a firebrick lined firebox. If it hadn't had a door on the front, it would have just been basically a free-standing fire place. So to clean it out, you cleaned it just like a fireplace - clean a spot of ashes, shove all the live coals into a pile on that spot, then clean the rest of the ash out. The door had two drafts on it, one at lower left and one at lower right. They operated by screwing them open or closed, as needed.

Coal ashes and clinkers went into the driveway to improve winter time traction. Wood ash generally went on to the garden patch, to enrich the soil for next spring's planting. Had to leave off dumping ashes there a couple months before the planting, though, to allow the weather to work it into the dirt before plowing.

We didn't have any fancy machinery in those days other than a chain saw. We'd cut the woods - usually, hard wood like oak and hickory, occasionally a sycamore or a walnut - and then drag it out of the woods with a horse in logs 12' or so long. Then we'd cut it to length, and I had the honors of splitting it with a double-bitted axe. We made some wedges out of hard wood from the branches, but I seldom ever used them. The axe just went quicker on all but the most recalcitrant chunks to be split. I once got 3 wedges stuck in a Black Gum chunk, all at the same time, due to the twisted grain of that tree. Wound up having to split that one with a chainsaw anyhow. I never got an axe stuck, however, so I figured the axe was really the way to go.

We kept two face cords stacked on the porch all winter long for easy access. One on either side of the porch entrance. If we weren't snowed in, we usually left them alone for the times when we were. The rest of what I split I just stacked right there at the splitting block, and that is what we burned at all but the worst parts of the winter.

We used to say that burning wood warmed you 3 separate times - once when you cut it down and hauled it out of the woods, once when you split it, and finally when you burned it. I've been out splitting wood on a sunny but 20 degrees below zero day, with no wind blowing, and had to take off my jacket and roll up my sleeves to keep from sweating and freezing stiff.

I've got 3 trees down in my yard right now, taken down by last fall's storms and thrown over the fence into my yard, special delivery. But I've got no chainsaw at the moment, and am going to have to cut them up with an axe to remove them. No point in splitting and stacking, since we have no wood stoves any more.

.

[Michigan Swamp Buck]

I put a new chain on over the weekend when I did my cutting for the week. I did a little better with 8 wheelbarrows during a single chainsaw tank's use this time. I don't know how much that little chainsaw tank holds, but by including the cost of 2-cycle oil, gas and bar oil per wheelbarrow load I can add up the money out of pocket for the cost of cutting a cord myself.

Then to take it all the way home, I can figure out the average cost of a cord of firewood in my area, minus hourly wages (based on minimum wage), minus the cost of gas, 2-cycle oil and bar oil, to come up with an average amount I saved heating my home. That amount could be considered an earned amount as if I sold the wood to someone at the local cost of a cord.

With these figures I can also determined the amount spent on a cord of firewood in terms of the actual money plus labor. This figure can be divided into a monthly cost over the entire year to determine my monthly heating bill. Of course this method of determining my home heating costs may not be entirely legal from a tax perspective or if applying for government aid, but it is the way I break it down to determine my heating costs.