Silver birch seasoning time

[openspaceman]

46 minutes ago, Acer Forestry said:

An old boy I know who's been doing firewood for years advises striping the birch (and other species that hold a fair water content) as soon as it's felled to allow moisture out;

I wonder if he too used to supply turnery poles. The striping, done with a tool made from a looped bandsaw blade attached to a long handle enabled the poles to season at a controlled rate if they couldn't immediately be extracted, otherwise the rot soon set in. As you know, I said earlier in the thread, birch bark is oily and waterproof so rotting takes place in the round and there is a positive feedback from the moisture condensed out as it is respired by the bugs.

 

For firewood there’s no worries about structural value being maintained so xcut and split is faster at getting rid of moisture.

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an underrated firewood I reckon, excellent stuff. Sometimes people are sniffy about the low grade woods but if you have volume, and some of us obviously do, it doesn't matter if the BTU's aren't that great. i don't mind alder, again if you catch it at the right seasoning point it isn't that bad, really

 

Well BTUs or calorific value are much the same between hardwoods  but birch has a bright lively flame probably because it is perishable with more Volatile Organic Compounds being evolved and yes I would be happy with only birch. Alder is also good for me.

 

Although my experiments showed not much difference between species drying in free air in my stack the birch has done better than the oak, not at all sure why.

Edited February 27, 2018 by openspaceman
pointing out my earlier post