If it Burns...BURN IT

Thank you, farmer-friend Dominic, for the title of this post. He puts on his fake Western Hanover County accent and declares this whenever I'm a bit short of firewood.

Which, at present, I am. It's my own damned fault.  If you heat with wood as I do, you may still want a backup for those cold nights when you don't want to go downstairs to fill the stove at 4am.  Of course, you may have to get up anyhow for other reasons, a consequence of reaching middle age.

That said, it's good to have backup. Our new Trane furnace had a manufacturing defect, a bent connection in the heat-exchanger, so it was blowing only cold air. This happened, of course, in the middle of a Polar Vortex. Our installer was on the job quickly, but his firm had to fight Trane for replacement parts. And the thermometer dropped.

The woodpile dropped, fast, too. My four full cords (a stack that would measure 32' x 4' x 4', stacked closely) was getting to it's final stages. I've been cutting and splitting white oak for 2019-20 since I plan to keep not four, but six cords on hand at all times. We already have plenty of green wood for next season but what to do until then?

I recalled an old run-in back in the woods, a haunt of snakes, full of really old firewood. So off I went to get it.

Surprisingly, a lot of wood was still hefty and not paperlike. I found at least one more useable cord, part of which I've pictured here. Yeah, yeah, I know that the firewood geeks (they do exist) caution against burning old wood. They also caution against pine. One imagines millions of Scandinavians freezing to death, every winter, because they don't have hardwood to burn.

The trick to any wood is to have a thermometer on the stove, to avoid two linked catastrophes that can cost you your house, maybe your life. We make sure that no matter what we burn, we avoid creosote build-up in the chimney or an overly hot stove. It's not hard, and despite popular stories about pine or cedar gumming up a flue, they won't in a hot stove. We've never had, in our annual cleanings of the chimney, reports of excess creosote.

Having seen a chimney fire once at a neighbor's house, I don't ever want to see one again. But if you are careful, if it burns, burn it!