How to Store Firewood
Back in the day, an adequate supply of firewood means the difference between life and death during the punishing winter season. These days, it’s a great heating alternative for your home. However, improper storage of your firewood may render them useless in the coming winter months. Read on to learn how to store your firewood properly.
Mark the trees you wish to cut down for firewood during the summer season, preferably the dead or diseased trees. It’s recommended that you do your logging in the late fall through the early spring. Size down the logs and split them.
Choose a place where to store your firewood, preferably outdoors and at least 30 ft away from your house. Stacks of firewood can be very attractive to pests like rats and termites. It’s also important that you choose a dry, sunny place where air can circulate.
The ideal place to keep your firewood is in an open-ended woodshed. If you don’t have a woodshed, you have these alternatives:
Log rack. Log racks are commercially available or you can make them on your own. You can make a shelf-type of log rack or one a log rack built to stand against a wall or an upright surface. To make a log rack made from poles, you need to find a place against the wall where you can build. Use two vertical poles and have them lean at an angle towards the wall. Use two horizontal poles and lay them on the ground, thick enough to keep the wood logs from the ground. Nail them to their corresponding vertical poles. Both sets of poles should be far enough from each other to accommodate your logs. Put wire or rope in between the two poles to provide more support to the wood stack.
Shipping pallets. You can use shipping pallets to store your firewood, too. Shipping pallets are easy to acquire and they provide space so that the wood does not touch the ground. Stabilize the shipping pallets by driving two large posts on either side of the pallet before stacking the wood.
Poles. You can make your own place to stack firewood without any carpentry involved. Get enough poles that will spread throughout the area where you want your wood stacked. Place them on top of one another in a checkered pattern. This will make sure that the firewood will not touch the ground. Next, make a “floor” out of split wood, bark side down, with the larger logs lining the edges and the smaller ones filling in the middle.
Stack split wood with the bark side down, facing the ground. This is because when placed the other way around, the bark will trap the moisture in the wood, which can cause molds to grow, or simply render your firewood unusable.
To start stacking the firewood, choose the largest split wood for the first layer of stacked firewood. Stack the second layer in such a way that it will run parallel to the first layer. While stacking, don’t pack the wood logs in too close each other, as they need air circulation to keep dry. You should also make sure that the pile does not lean in any one particular direction. For log racks set up against walls, the stacking should assume a triangular shape. For stacks that assume a circular shape, like those stacked on poles, you should build up from the middle of the circle to ensure an even stack. Put “tiles” on the top of the circular firewood stack to make sure water runs off the logs. Stacks should not be higher than six feet, for easy access purposes.
Cover the stack of firewood with canvas or tarpaulin. There are commercially-made tarpaulins made especially to cover stacks of firewood that come with strings to secure them, but simple rocks will do to help keep the cover secure.
Take off the canvas cover on sunny days, to promote more air circulation and get rid of any moisture that may have trapped within.