[Closed] How much do you pay for logs?

Locally I'm 120 quid for a bag of hard and a bag of soft, went through a spell of buying for a couple of years, but I'm back to liberating my own now.

Seeing as this is STW... what was it's moisture content?

I have a van and a saw, so nothing.
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I did have to buy some a couple of years ago for various reasons, three bulk bags was £135, cheapest I could find. Air dried, mostly sycamore

We pay £120/ load which is probably about two tonne bags, where are you based?

Two tonne bags won't get you through winter unless it's occasional top up. We'll get through 4-6m3 a winter, used in two fires (one stove one open) as a secondary heat source but quite a big house. A mix of bought and foraged, got about 2m3 of alder to go at this time round for starters

Two tonne bags won’t get you through winter

This. Basically the reason I'm back getting my own, going through 3 of those bag of each loads, 360 quid. Couple of days cutting chopping covers that.

In my last place in Kent a local place did 2M cubed mixed bag of Hardwood for £90 or £110 for pure Oak or Ash.

It all depends whether it's for background use (ie you've central heating but wasted your money on a fire/stove) or you need logs to heat the house.

IME unless it's fully/kiln dried you just can't get enough heat out of the logs and/or you need to put one on every 5 mins as the fire is 'roaring'.

We spend more, on kiln dried, and get through about 4-5m3 pa in a stove - no C/H.

what was it’s moisture content?

Er, 'seasoned'

Two tonne bags won’t get you through winter unless it’s occasional top up.

Yeah, I guess we'll see. Single stove, it'll be lit pretty much evenings and weekends only.

where are you based?

Near Stockport/Macclesfield (Disley to be precise)

Those that liberate their own, where do you liberate it from?

About £90-£120 for 1m^3 of Kiln dried hardwood - depends on the time of year. Bristol.

(ie you’ve central heating but wasted your money on a fire/stove)

Or you have central heating, but live in old, cold, stone house, on the top of a hill.

Those that liberate their own, where do you liberate it from?

That's what I was wondering.

I was lucky enough to have had a neighbouring block of flats with about five 70+ ft cedars that needed removing. The tree surgeon gave us the remnants of one them that kept us going for a while. Otherwise, we have just scrounged here and there, and so avoided paying.

Logs are like sex - free often costs you more than just buying it in.

You start with a bow saw and and small axe > chainsaw + Full PPE + training > Pickup + chainsaw + log splitter + full PPE + taking over the garden to rotate/season the logs.

Don't ask me how I know this.

@IHN - I seem to recall you’re on top of the hill above Lyme?? No idea why I think that but I can point you in the direction of some very cheap firewood nearby if you have a chainsaw / willing to split and season yourself? PM me if any interest.

Before I started buying by the wagon load (uncut timber)... £60 for hardwood dumpy, reasonably generous if neither that reliably dry and cut a bit random. Still as long as you bought enough ahead of time and didn't mind that your stack didn't look perfect neither of those presented an issue.

qwerty
Free Member
Seeing as this is STW… what was it’s moisture content?

Seeing as this is STW... its

IME unless it’s fully/kiln dried you just can’t get enough heat out of the logs and/or you need to put one on every 5 mins as the fire is ‘roaring’.

I'll beg to differ mate, In my opinion kiln dried is a waste of energy and money, as soon as it's stored, itll begin to absorb moisture.

My wee charnwood kicks out a rare heat, and I have it far from roaring.

I seem to recall you’re on top of the hill above Lyme??

I might be, you stalking weirdo... 😉

I’ll beg to differ mate, In my opinion kiln dried is a waste of energy and money, as soon as it’s stored, itll begin to absorb moisture.

@Nobeerinthefridge

We store outside, but have at least 3 fired loads stored inside, beside the fire. as the fire is used, the wood beside it dries out again. As delivered Kiln dried is usually around 15-20% on the surface. When stored outside over winter it's usually over 30% on the surface when brought inside. Used from inside, beside the fire, it's around 15%.

With seasoned wood, the quality we get is very variable. We've had 25%-60% moisture as delivered.

With Kiln dried. we need to clean the glass on the fire (it's about 24"x12") maybe once every 20-30 times the fire is started. It burns very clean. With seasoned wood, that value was reduced by about a 3rd. It definitely burned dirtier.

With seasoned wood, the quality we get is very variable. We’ve had 25%-60% moisture as delivered.

You appear to be missing out the obvious middle option....

Season the wood a bit yourself, outside.

Exactly. Even when I went through my wee buying spell, I'd plan ahead and season myself. I prefer that using moisture meters, YMMV.

And that's before we even consider the energy used in kiln drying, only for the user to have to season again.

For £30 (difference Kiln > Seasoned) I'd rather not lose another chuck of garden space to store another couple of cubic metres of wood. I'm also not convinced that it'd get to the 20% value that people quote. I've never seen seasoned below 25%. We don't use enough for it to be a financial problem.

On the seasoning/storing front, what's better, a dry and slightly draughty stable, or outside under a covered walkway, that gets a really steady breeze through but will get a bit damp if it's rainy and windy as it's open on one side?

Not saying you're wrong daffy! Just my 2 bob.

IHN I reckon exposed to wind, rain isn't really an issue, as long as it's dry when you wanna burn it. I take mine into a wee alcove next to my fire.

How much do you pay for logs?

The public loos at Boscastle last week wouldn't let me in without paying 20p....

Airflow is your friend - and don’t bother with a cover on them. If you have a covered spot for a few days worth, just use that a couple of days before burning.

Edit - and Fiskars x25 for splitting
Don’t piss about with wedges or cheap fibreglass handled mauls.

Fiskars x25

And an X10 for sorting out the small bits.

I don't kiln dry any of my wood. I stack on pallets with a tarp roof and leave outside for a good few months. When there's a nice long warm & dry spell I leave as long as I dare and then bring in the outer layers it all into the wood shed before it gets wet again. By the time I bring it in it will be well below 20% but it starts accumlating moisture pretty quickly and generally settles into the mid 20s over the wetter months.

To combat that I keep as much as I can indoors by the fire at any time so that its back down by the time I want to burn it.

Bought logs will likely cost a bit more this winter. The woodsure scheme, the government scheme to ensure wood is dry, costs the supplier quite a lot to register. Plus the price of road side processor grade wood is only going one way.

Make friends with your local tree surgeons. Make the effort to ring round. You'll soon enough find one or several that work in your area and are only too keen to dump logs for free instead of paying to get rid and/or driving further. I've never paid other than a bit of beer money and heat the house entirely with wood and supply my mum too. I've processed 30 cube over the last 18 months all hand split. I did treat myself to another new chainsaw left month though. I worked out the last one cost me under £1.50 /cube in capital cost, including chains.

In seven years we haven't spent a penny and burn a lot with two stoves. Not at the same time but different areas of the house mean we're burning pretty much all day in the winter, I hate to think what it would have cost if we'd paid for it all.

With kiln dried the logs are almost a waste product for the supplier, they make their money on rhi payments. It's ridiculous. If you've lots of space to store inside, or very limited space to store and season outside, or you can't find a decent supplier of air dried (or supplier of decent air dried?) kiln dried may make sense.

Seeing as this is STW

I only use handcrafted, artisanal firewood.

Yeah, bin dun aplenty I know, but I like it 😊

Yeah, bin dun aplenty I know, but I like it

It's a beautiful piece of work that rips the piss out of almost every kickstarter video around these days but still you get them

I'm disappointed this is not a question about AWS or Kibana.

I normally buy seasoned by the bulk bag, it is variable, the stuff I got two years ago literally wouldn't burn until it had another year stacked and the seller was a proper fraudster...started getting nasty so I just left a suitable review a year later at the start of autumn. (Avoiding specifics which meant he couldn't argue back)

Tempted to go kiln dried this year, in my mind, even if it absorbs a bit of moisture whilst stored, it'll never be worse than good seasoned timber in the same log store.

As top up heat in a 5kw stove with the rest of the house a bit colder than most would be happy with, I get through 2-3 bulk bags, but if I tried that with damp wood I'd probably get through double as you have to leave the vents open and heat roaring up the chimney rather than a nice hot lazy flame.

I've just cut and shut my logstore so it fits in a more sheltered spot, just waiting for the first coat of paint to go off 🙂

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Wood costs money?!

Please don't buy kiln dried wood you might be aiding the creation of greenhouse gases / release of long cycle captured CO2.

10sq m of birch for £500. That'll be a year's worth with a bit left over if it's another cold one.

I cut, dry and store a bit from our own land too but don't have enough of it or the time and inclination to generate enough for our needs.

I would not buy kiln dried but only burn properly dry wood with is a perfectly set of variables.

Nowt for as much I want, sadly don’t have a log burner/stove

For my 2p on this.
Just keep an eye out for downed branches after high winds, January and February is a good time. I live near big old Beech trees and they throw branches after wind all the time. Take a wheelbarrow and a bow saw or hand saw up the woods and process them into transportable bits. If your area is anything like mine, no-one will give a shit so long as the path the branches were laying across (every time..) are now clear. I always make sure to leave some for the mushrooms too.
As far as drying it out, just split and stack with good air flow. What I do is bring , say, two bags for life full inside and leave them by the airing cupboard when the nights start to get a bit of a chill. That usually lasts me about 2-3 nights worth, i prefer a nice background glow to constantly raging inferno. I then bring another bag full in to start drying, to gently bake as my nice dry logs are smouldering nicely away.
And as for dirty fire glass, this is down to insufficient air flow and excess moisture / resin in the logs, in my experience.
Oh, and removing any soot/ residue from the glass is easy. Mr.Sheen and a nylon dish sponge, gleaming every time.

I used to buy logs. Used a number of suppliers. Got fed up of getting a good percentage of the logs covered in black mould, soft wood mixed in with the hardwood, lugging loose logs into my house from the street, burning through really fast...
I buy heat logs now. Hate doing it. They come wrapped in plastic. But it is so much easier and the logs give off loads more heat. Pay a fortune, about £300 a tonne. It's either that or kiln dried for me though. I live in a really damp place and it's difficult to dry anything here naturally.

bit of damp newspaper dipped in the ash(cold) is good for cleaning the glass. ours doesn't need it that often as the new stove burns very clean.

last winter was paying £120 for a load equal to 2 bulk bags of hardwood.

Two tonne bags won’t get you through winter unless

you insulate properly.

I paid 60e/m3 for the first load then my friends and neighbours learned I burned wood. "I'm having the oaks trimmed and they want 600e to take away the wood, do you want it". "I'm having a charme felled, they want 800e to clear up and take it away, do you want it?", etc..

My wheel barrow gets to places that big machines won't.

There is some pretty weird stuff in this thread, I heat entirely with a wood stove and cut all my own wood, most dried hardwoods stabilise at 15% moisture content, this is what they arrive at naturally, in a damp atmosphere goes up to 18%, dry and it goes down, kiln dried is lower but stored it will go back to 15%..ish, burning it at a higher moisture content causes more smoke and less heat, if it hisses it's too wet, you can get moisture meters for less than a tenner.

I'm currently on building site off cuts, should keep me going into winter but I have a sycamore tree I cut last year, bout 4 tons, this will do just the winter, local logs £45 per ton bag delivered, a 25kg bag of smokeless nuts to keep it burning overnight is £10.

Someone asked where to get free wood, depends on the stove and what you can burn, if you have an old beast of a stove you can get as much softwood as you can collect from your forestry commission plantation for £15 a year, this may have gone up, factor in cleaning the flue and replacing bits of the stove when the heat bends it, I personally wouldn't burn it.

I cut locally, farmers let me know what they want rid of, birch thinnings are my favourite, nice round one split diameter, cuts down and sections up in minutes, dries and burns great, got an oak tree a couple of years ago that fell across a road, great wood but it took the best part of 4 days to cut it up and lug it all back, another couple of days to chop and stack, shattered by the end of it, cutting birch is like a day out in the woods by comparison.

It depends on temp and humidity. I found a chart on the Web once, us forestry department I think, that have the wet basis MC for seasoned wood stored outside but top covered, by temp and humidity. Then using charts for average weather in different UK cities by month you can get the MC you should achieve. Iirc, South East should get logs down to about 17% but they will climb to 21% come February. SW is wetter as more humid but not much, up north and several degrees cooler temps the MC were a chunk higher. I can't recall what, but by Aberdeen it could well be you'll be looking at about 25% equilibrium mc, wet basis.

[i]I’m currently on building site off cuts, .... a 25kg bag of smokeless nuts to keep it burning overnight is £10[/i]

Building site (treated) offcuts, presumably you don't have any neighbours! I've tentatively tried a couple of small bits, and a neighbour heats his wood fired hot-tube on pallets and it stinks the whole road out! Mixing wood and smokeless is also pretty harsh on the stove/flue as the water and sulphur create a corrosive gunk.

It depends on temp and humidity. I found a chart on the Web once, us forestry department I think, that have the wet basis MC for seasoned wood stored outside but top covered, by temp and humidity. Then using charts for average weather in different UK cities by month you can get the MC you should achieve. Iirc, South East should get logs down to about 17% but they will climb to 21% come February. SW is wetter as more humid but not much, up north and several degrees cooler temps the MC were a chunk higher. I can’t recall what, but by Aberdeen it could well be you’ll be looking at about 25% equilibrium mc, wet basis

Once it's dry hard wood is about 15%, anywhere, it can get damp outside but if it's already dry it will only be the surface, wood is hydroscopic but it can't rehydrate unless it's soaking, it's stacked outdoors in Norway and still gets there with colder wetter weather than the UK.

Building site (treated) offcuts, presumably you don’t have any neighbours! I’ve tentatively tried a couple of small bits, and a neighbour heats his wood fired hot-tube on pallets and it stinks the whole road out! Mixing wood and smokeless is also pretty harsh on the stove/flue as the water and sulphur create a corrosive gunk.

Just the white wood, tanalised will gas you and doesn't burn, untreated pallet wood is fine but not worth the trouble because it's gone in minutes, agree mixing wood and anthracite in a wood stove is not a good idea, hence why I have multi fuel stove, but you can put 4 or 5 bits on to keep it from going out without doing harm, no idea what the corrosive gunk is or where the water comes in?
If you are getting smoke the stove is cold, once up to temperature it will burn clean with pretty much anything but damp wood or tanalised(with a green tinge to it)

Just to say it varies massively.
May start to standardise on small loads in England due to Woodsure scheme, but over 2 cube could remain quite varied as can be sold with a note saying that you should season it - it will probably be the same stuff you have been buying for years if it's your regular supplier.

So much here I'm selling it to make space for more 😉

I think the best tip is get a moisture meter, another is cut dead standing birch, anyone will let you have that and it dries in no time.

as much as i can !

here you go espresso, not quite as i rembered outside SE, but you will see the variations across the months.

ESF.EDU "https://www.esf.edu/wus/documents/EMCofWoodFPL268.pdf"

it doesn't go into depths on rate of change, which we all know depends on split size and wood type as well as the weather, but many firewood logs will gain a few percent MC between October and Jan IME

as for wood stove vs multifuel, the construction differences are just the grate for coal, I'm afraid the rest of the stove is usually identical. The stove isn't such a problem as the flue though. burn wood and the combustion products are h2o and co2, quite a bit of both, most smokeless 'coal' is actually an oil product and some of the brands contain quite a bit of sulphur, so while I wouldn't know if it's 'gunk' spooky is right, wood and smokeless coal burnt together creates a very corrosive flue gas, which can cause problems.

What sort of problems?

I just looked at that document...ooft, I have been burning wood for 7 years as my only heat, and I have a moisture meter, and it reads 15% when it's dry, some take longer than others, and it varies by about 3% between seasons once dry, oak same as birch same as rock hard hawthorn, ok I'm only in one place and can't speak for other places but if I can get 15% in Scotland I'm fairly confident everywhere south can too.

Also, yes cheap stoves turn into multi fuel with a different grate, but coal, anthracite and wood all burn optimally at different temperatures, you can get this by changing the flue to burn quicker/hotter, or a dedicated stove, the difference is in how much fuel you need to burn per heat out of it.

if its a £5 moisture meter like mine or most, it doesn't read wet basis, it reads dry, it isn't calibrated and setable for different wood types and consequently its exact reading may be out, its a guide but not gospel. If it doesn't have a setting to offset for temperature, and cheap ones don't, then do you take the wood inside for several hours to let it warm to room temps? as its 'calibrated' for use at about that temp. I presume you then resplit the log and read the mc inside the log at several spots, jamming the pins in hard and do you place the pins across or along the grain? cheap meters are just a guide.
I agree you can air dry down to sub 20% and I see little point in kiln dried (unless you can store it inside, or don't have a decent supplier of ir dried). As I said, I've 30 cube in the garden, half of which has been CSS for the last 2 summers and I'm confident it is dry and ready to burn.

the SO2 reacts with the H2O to form H2SO3, a strong acid. with a stainless lined flue of 904 it will resist this to a fir extent but not perfectly, a 316 liner can rot in a winter or 2 of heavy wood/smokeless mix use. if not metal lined I believe the acid can attack the mortar

I live on 6 acres of hardwood, mainly eucalypt. Fell them very occasionally. It burns brilliantly, but the chainsaw really struggles it's so bloody tough.

We pay £80 for softwood and £90 for hardwood - west/north Yorks border. It's nominally a cube but the yard has a front loader with a small bucket and they just scoop a load up from the pile. Fills about 1.2m^3 in our woodstore when packed reasonably well.

Many years ago I worked on a building site and took the offcuts home. However with the site being for a hotel all the timber was treated with fire retardant! That didn't go well.

if its a £5 moisture meter like mine or most, it doesn’t read wet basis, it reads dry, it isn’t calibrated and setable for different wood types and consequently its exact reading may be out, its a guide but not gospel. If it doesn’t have a setting to offset for temperature, and cheap ones don’t, then do you take the wood inside for several hours to let it warm to room temps? as its ‘calibrated’ for use at about that temp. I presume you then resplit the log and read the mc inside the log at several spots, jamming the pins in hard and do you place the pins across or along the grain? cheap meters are just a guide.
I agree you can air dry down to sub 20% and I see little point in kiln dried (unless you can store it inside, or don’t have a decent supplier of ir dried). As I said, I’ve 30 cube in the garden, half of which has been CSS for the last 2 summers and I’m confident it is dry and ready to burn.

the SO2 reacts with the H2O to form H2SO3, a strong acid. with a stainless lined flue of 904 it will resist this to a fir extent but not perfectly, a 316 liner can rot in a winter or 2 of heavy wood/smokeless mix use. if not metal lined I believe the acid can attack the mortar

There are a lot of strange SO2'S and H2SO3's in there, I have a bog standard steel flue that has not needed swept in 7 years, it's not rotted, and smoke doesn't get near mortar??

I took my cheapo moisture meter into work to calibrate it with one that cost several hundred quid, it was the same reading, and if you split dry wood it's the same moisture content on the inside after splitting, it only varies if it's still drying and not ready.

You don't burn smokeless anthracite and wood together, there would be no point, you use the nuts to burn longer, the wood burns away and you switch over to anthracite, similar to anyone starting a coal fire with kindling.