Doesn't mean I didn't have help. The log splitter showed up for work today...and behaved itself.
Together we chewed through the remainder of the woodpile in a little over an hour. I then took another forty-five minutes to properly stack the split wood.
There's a wide variety of wood types in there: ash, cherry, red and sugar maple, gray birch, paper birch. Two rows of wood about 16 feet long and stacked up to 4.5 feet high. As you can see, the front row is not complete.
With the wood already in the garage, I figure the total volume to be approximately 1.5 cords. If we depended upon firewood to heat the house, we'd be up the creek. But we only use the fireplace if/when the temperature stays around 25 degrees in order to supplement the propane fired furnace. I've had to light the fire--for two days--last week. There's a chance of snow on Wednesday (1-3 inches) but the temperatures through mid-December will be above freezing and even into the 40s and 50s so the woodpile is likely to go untouched for a couple of weeks at least.
After stacking the wood and covering it with a tarp weighted down with stones, I burned the scraps from splitting and the few pieces of punky wood that had been left in the pile too long. Most of that was paper birch cut two-three years ago. The birch bark burned readily do to the oils it contained the inner portions of the logs--not so much. And the bark that fell off the logs I split was damp and burned with a huge amount of smoke.
2 comments:
I have split wood the old fashioned way, never had the luxury of a log splitter. I guess that would be a necessity up where y'all live :)
I've done it with a maul in the past...the long ago past. Tough on the arms and back. This splitter makes it a lot easier and, almost as important, takes far less time. BUT you've still got to manhandle the logs into place and pickup/stack the split pieces.
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