Firewood in Lawrence and Topeka

Freshly cut hardwood is roughly half water by weight. Burn it and most of the energy in the fire goes into boiling that water off instead of into your room, the fire runs cool, and the unburned volatiles condense in the flue as creosote. That is the mechanism behind chimney fires, and it comes almost entirely from burning wet wood.

Properly seasoned wood sits around 20 percent moisture or below. Getting there means splitting the rounds first, since bark is a moisture barrier and an unsplit round will sit in a pile for two years and still be wet in the middle, then stacking it off the ground with air moving through it and the top covered. In the Kansas climate, split and stacked oak takes a year or more. Hackberry, honeylocust, and ash dry faster, often in six to nine months.

The tells are easy to check. Seasoned wood is grey and checked on the ends, noticeably lighter than green wood of the same size, and two pieces knocked together ring rather than thud. Bark that comes loose easily is another sign. If a fresh split face feels cool and damp to the back of your hand, it needs more time.

Osage orange, called hedge locally, is the hottest firewood in this region by a wide margin. It throws sparks, so it belongs in a stove rather than an open fireplace, and it burns so hot that a stove full of it can overfire. Most people who burn hedge use it mixed with something milder or reserve it for the coldest nights. There is a lot of it around here because of the hedge rows planted as living fence across Douglas, Shawnee, and Leavenworth counties.

Oak is the standard. Bur oak and red oak both burn long and steady with good coal beds, which is what you want for an overnight burn, and both take the longest to season. Honeylocust burns hot and clean and splits reasonably. Hackberry is a good middle of the road wood that seasons fast, which makes it useful when you did not plan far enough ahead. Mulberry burns well and sparks like hedge.

What to avoid is the soft fast growing stuff. Silver maple, cottonwood, and Siberian elm all burn quickly with low heat output, and elm in particular is famously difficult to split by hand because of its interlocked grain. They are not useless, they just are not what you want to fill a rack with. Pine is fine for kindling and a bad choice for a sustained fire in a stove.

Firewood is straightforward to buy and easy to get wrong, mostly on volume and on moisture. We will tell you what species you are getting and how long it has been split and stacked before you commit to anything.

Stacking is included. Dumping a load in a driveway and driving off leaves you with a day of work you did not budget for.

Wood needs to be off the ground. Stacked directly on soil, the bottom course wicks moisture up and rots, and you lose the layer that has been sitting the longest. Pallets, a purpose built rack, or a couple of rails made from the crooked rounds nobody wants to split all work.

Cover the top and leave the sides open. A tarp wrapped over the whole stack traps evaporating moisture inside and keeps the wood wet indefinitely, which is a common and expensive mistake. Cover the top eighteen inches or so and let the wind, which we have plenty of, do the rest.

Keep the stack away from the house. Firewood against a foundation or a wall is a bridge for carpenter ants, termites, and mice, and it holds moisture against the siding. Six to ten feet away is enough. Bring in what you need for a few days at a time rather than storing a week of wood indoors.

If we are taking a tree down on your property and you burn, say so before the crew starts. We will cut the trunk and the larger limb wood into rounds at whatever length you specify and stack them wherever you want them, at no additional charge. It costs us less to leave that wood than to load it and haul it, which is why this is a genuine no charge item rather than a favor.

Two exceptions apply and both are about not spreading a problem. Wood from a pine killed by pine wilt cannot be kept for firewood. K-State is explicit that a dead pine has to be chipped or burned before May 1, because the pine sawyer beetles carrying the nematode will hatch out of stacked wood and move to the next living pine in the neighborhood. Ash from a tree killed by emerald ash borer is fine to burn where it stands, but moving it any distance risks carrying the insect somewhere it is not yet established.

Rounds are not firewood. Splitting is a separate job and it is real work, particularly on Siberian elm. If you want your own tree split rather than left in rounds, tell us and we will price it. Otherwise you get rounds, stacked, and the maul is yours.