Log storage in town houses

[Tarrel]

(17 November 2012, 22:11)Straight Shooter Wrote: good point tarrel ...wood needs air flowing into it.. the dryer the better.. if your wood has high water content you tend to open the air intakes to get it to burn....then water turns to steem and releases any tar in the wood... this lines the flue and chimney NOT GOOD VERY DANGEROUS...and a bastard to clean ummmm so i,m told , if you fell a tree it will be 1800 months to dry it to perfection....unless its ash ....burn that in a month ....pallets .... the square block spacers are great ...or round ones will keep your fire in all nite . like nr i,m like a rat up a shit pipe when there,s wood about ,i am in there....i have a woodland on my ground.....soon as the leaves stop falling i,ll be dropping some nice oaks and ash ..the secret is always at least a year in front... there,s less pessure on you

I guess that's 18 months you mean, otherwise we're going to have a long wait!

Yes, there's no doubt that wet wood causes problems. To be honest, ours isn't as dry as I would like. We've just not been storing it for long enough. I did consider buying in a couple of loads to get us going this season, but decided you never really know what you're getting, so I'm running with dry-ish wood (25% moisture content or less). I picked up a tip on the Navitron forum, which is to cut the wood smaller and use this to get a really good blaze going and warm up the firebox. Once the firebox is good and hot, it will cope with the damper wood more easily. This is working well for us, plus it gives me more axe-time! I now have two sections to my wood pile; "starter wood" and "slow burn" wood. We're also planning on having the chimney swept every 3-4 months.