Best/Fastest seasoning of firewood

[mac2]

Looking for ideas on this please guys.

Regards R 

[eggsarascal]

Kiln.

[mac2]

Short but sweet. Are there companies that will kiln dry wood? Central scotland? 

[slasherscot]

theres someone from callander who has a kiln, ex timber haulage contractor. does firewood

 

[Woodworks]

Fastest drying would be softwoods like larch a douglas IME. Fastest drying hardwoods that I can consistently get is beech. Yes it's very wet when fresh but once cut, spilt and stored in crates it loses it's moisture very quickly. Birch and sycamore both dry fast but I cant get much of either. Ash is a funny one in that it's by the far the driest fresh cut but slow to dry further. Did some tests in the past on split logs stacked in open sheds and after a year the beech was drier than the ash. As said above nothing can beat a kiln for speed.

 

If your looking to buy now and sell this winter a kiln is the only way to get properly dry logs IMO. Second best would be ash or softwood but doubt it would be properly dry this season.

 

 

[Stubby]

Fastest air dried seasoning hard wood for me is Sycamore . Easiest splitting as well .

Edited November 8, 2017 by Stubby

[Lillywhite Timber]

Cant disagree with anything thats been said already , U wont dry much this time of year without a Kiln .

[richardwale]

I know already I'm going to sell all the dry wood I have, I just wish there was a simple way of building a kiln to dry 4 or 5 cube here and there to keep it ticking over. 

Any ideas on cheap easy to build kiln using workshop stove type appliance to heat the wood?.

[openspaceman]

15 hours ago, richardwale said:

I know already I'm going to sell all the dry wood I have, I just wish there was a simple way of building a kiln to dry 4 or 5 cube here and there to keep it ticking over. 

Any ideas on cheap easy to build kiln using workshop stove type appliance to heat the wood?.

Yes this is a case where you may be able to justify the expense and there are many ways to skin this cat: for instance how do you intend to load and unload the kiln , decrease the labour verses increase the capital cost.

 

The main thing to realise is that you need to put heat into the box to evaporate water, the more heat you put in the faster the rate of evaporation but also as you increase the heat you need to increase the fan power to circulate the heat. Three phase fans tend to be cheaper than single phase . If you only intend to use natural circulation you can measure your drying time in weeks, with high heat and circulation we managed to reduce moisture from 60% to 25% in a 24 hour loading cycle but at the expense of high capital cost.

 

If I were involved in doing this again I would still aim to process and season using natural (solar) drying  and just top up, as you intend, to maintain trade using a high temperature process but would be looking to utilise the waste heat.

[richardwale]

I'm ok with the labour side of things, so im not really looking to save anything there, just wondered if an old 20 ft shipping container could be cheaply modified to dry firewood? Even if drying from green to dry took a few weeks?