Tips For Choosing The Right Firewood!

Now most people – preppers and non-preppers alike – automatically assume that burning firewood is one of the easiest things you can do to survive.

After all, what’s there to know? All wood is the same, right?

Wrong.

The more you know about the different types of firewood, the more you can prevent disastrous mistakes from happening. Because if you choose the wrong type of wood, it might do more than just not burn correctly – it might even be hazardous to your health.

Here's the scoop on selecting the right firewood for your needs and how to store it through the year.

Choose hardwoods: For long, lingering fires with lots of coals, choose hardwoods like oak, locust, hickory, and black maple. For small and simple fires while you cuddle and watch a movie at home, go for softer hardwoods like birch, poplar, cottonwood, or red maple. Softwoods like pine may be cheap and abundant, but they burn very quickly and you may find yourself hauling heavy loads of wood to and fro more often than you'd like.

Make sure your wood is properly seasoned: "Seasoning" is simply the term for drying your wood. Before you light that first fire, make sure your wood is fully dry. While surface water evaporates quickly on a piece of wood, any moisture remaining inside the wood causes it to ignite slowly, burn inefficiently, and smoke or smolder, producing little heat despite having a flame.

Split your logs: Split wood dries quicker and burns better than round logs. Depending on the size of the log, split the wood into halves or quarters. It should be easy to hold with one hand and be no more than 6 to 8 inches in width, with the ideal size being 3 to 6 inches for most modern fireplaces inside the home.

Purchase the right size: A split piece of wood should be no longer than 18 inches long, with 16 inches a safer measurement to fit inside indoor fireplaces. If you're splitting your own firewood in Blue Mountains, resist the temptation to cut down the last few feet in equal lengths to avoid "leftovers." Split them no more than 16 inches long, and chop the remaining end into several smaller pieces to use as kindling.

Never store firewood inside your home: If the wood has termites or ants, you don't want to introduce them into your house! Keep a few logs near your fireplace for those evenings by the fire, but store the rest of your firewood outside and restock as needed.

If you don't have a covered woodshed or storage area, store your firewood with the bark side of the log on top. Bark is a natural barrier and will keep some of the rain from saturating your wood. You can also lay a large tarp over the wood pile to protect it over winter; keep it weighed down on top with stones or bricks, but don't fully cover the pile on all sides as you want to keep it ventilated.

Allow proper airflow around the wood: keep it off the ground and avoid stacking wood directly against a wall. Keep the pile elevated a few inches, either in a firewood rack, on a recycled pallet, or with a couple of thin, long logs running across the firewood underneath.

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