Which is better value for money - Air dried @25% MC or Kiln dried Firewood @ 20%MC ?

[aesmith]

By the way where does anyone find air dried offered at 25% MC?  Or are we assuming that most suppliers actually don't do any better than that, even though most claim sub 20%.  My local place (the £50 softwood) says they aim for 15-17% but are only promising sub 20%.

[Stubby]

2 hours ago, aesmith said:

By the way where does anyone find air dried offered at 25% MC?  Or are we assuming that most suppliers actually don't do any better than that, even though most claim sub 20%.  My local place (the £50 softwood) says they aim for 15-17% but are only promising sub 20%.

20% is good enough for me . Anything less and I would want to pay less !

[openspaceman]

9 hours ago, aesmith said:

Back in the real world I don't need any sort of calculation to tell me that air dried softwood at £50/cube is miles better value than kiln dried hardwood at £140.   Does anyone find prices in their area sufficiently different so that kiln dried wins out?  

Bearing in mind I don't sell or buy hardwood just collect for my own use, though in the past I did commercial work on dryers and chip stoking boilers, hence my interest in the science, I take what I can get, and don't turn my nose up at softwood. Felled in winter it can have a low moisture content and it does dry fast once split.

 

Anyway the basic density of pine and   oak from the blue book says 350 kg and 540 kg oven dry timber per m3. As pine is a slightly higher calorific value I would suggest when buying by cubic metre bulk loads the ratio should be about 70% the price of oak for similar heat output at the same moisture content. It will be lower for spruce.

[Phil H]

Bearing in mind I don't sell or buy hardwood just collect for my own use, though in the past I did commercial work on dryers and chip stoking boilers, hence my interest in the science, I take what I can get, and don't turn my nose up at softwood. Felled in winter it can have a low moisture content and it does dry fast once split.
 
Anyway the basic density of pine and   oak from the blue book says 350 kg and 540 kg oven dry timber per m3. As pine is a slightly higher calorific value I would suggest when buying by cubic metre bulk loads the ratio should be about 70% the price of oak for similar heat output at the same moisture content. It will be lower for spruce.

What is the blue book that you refer to, out of interest?

[openspaceman]

2 hours ago, Phil H said:

What is the blue book that you refer to, out of interest?

FC booklet 39 forest mensuration handbook

[ash_smith123]

[emoji23] what a load of [emoji90]
All I see is a biased comparison of 2 different products, one you like and the other you don't.
I don't know what you need to carry on trying to justify to us that seasoned firewood seems to be far superior than kiln drying it.
We are retail businesses, I supply what the customer wants and customers want kiln dried hardwood.
If youve got the time, space and can be arsed you crack on processing and leaving firewood outside for 6-12 months then fine, but stop badgering the people that don't or don't want to.
I supplied 2 products for the last 6 years, seasoned hardwood (25% that we actually kiln dried in our own kiln) and a kiln dried product that we bought in at 15% moisture. Sales were always around 70% kiln dried to 30% seasoned.
This winter was the first time we stopped supplying seasoned hardwood and only sold kiln dried. Sales were up around 10% overall this winter.

[BuyFirewodDirect]

I would say that kiln dried.However i doubt that there are any tangible prove today.  You need same size logs in different MC to check and compare.  5% Gap is so narrow that you might even need a lab for correct readings. I can only speculate that kiln dried 20%. Martin from Buy Firewood Direct

[benedmonds]

7 hours ago, Big J said:

 

Burning wood to dry wood that is for burning is fundamentally stupid.

 

Especially when they use wet wood to dry it and cut down native forests in eastern Europe and transport it hundreds of miles..

[ash_smith123]

Sorry but commercially air drying makes no sense in firewood. The same way you see harvesters and forwarders in the forest doing the same job as a chainsaw and a horse. Big sawmills pumping out cubic metres of timber on big saw lines instead of one lad sat on a woodmizer doing a cube a day. Unfortunately anything on a commercial scale has an environmental impact. The end user is the one that decides on how the whole supply chain operates. If the end user only wants air dried firewood everyone will be selling air dried firewood but they don't so we will carry on selling kiln dried firewood.
The industry has done this to itself. So many people have sold substandard firewood for years and the customers have finally over the last 5/7 years got used to buying quality kiln dried firewood. They will only buy it once and not go back to Dave the farmer that's scrapped a load of crap off the barn floor that he sold as "barn dried" that he cut 3 weeks ago.

[trigger_andy]

9 hours ago, ash_smith123 said:

The end user is the one that decides on how the whole supply chain operates.

kind of. Id say legislation is the ultimate deciding factor on how a supply chain works. As kiln drying is clearly a colossal waste of energy and CO2 for firewood production then if the correct legislation and information was available to the customer as to why its no longer available then Air dried would return to being the norm. 

 

Seller who sell their logs as kiln Dried when in fact they are using a Solar Kiln or a Polytunnel are confusing the issue somewhat and I can see why they would want to jump on the Kiln dried bandwagon. Im my eyes they are just air drying but more efficiently. Something that could be legislated for if kiln dried, ie,real kiln drying was withdrawn for the obvious environmental impact.