Today's big task: stacking firewood

[altivo]

One face cord, stored in horse barn where it's pretty dry.

Comments

[ranunculus]

No amount of clicking produces a photo.

[altivo]

Fixed, I think. Not Dreamwidth, but Google being obnoxious. Thanks for putting me onto the working solution: upload photo directly here. Waste of space and bandwidth, but cuts Google or Flickr out of the loop and kills their shenanigans for getting ad exposure.

[hrrunka]

It seems to me that photo hosting sites these days seem to go out of their way to force you to look at photos only through the site itself (or through some hideous embedding link). The link in the IMG tag in your entry is to the Google Photos page for the image, not the image itself, so it works (some of the time, anyway) as a straight link (thus: https://photos.app.goo.gl/8L3xHmVBc9WY3t8q9 ) but not as an image unless the browser can do some digging behind the scenes (which might be happening, especially if you're loged into Google).

We could really use a nice dry place to stack our wood here. We're on the flank of the southern end of the Cotswolds, and sometimes the cloud base is a little way down hill so the outdoor humidity is 100%, and everything gets damp...

[altivo]

You are right. It seems to be Google. I think it's fixed now.

Yeah, keeping firewood dry in humidity is difficult. The cord from last year, off the right edge of this photo, has blue mold on some of the wood. Appears to be a Penicillium sp. so not dangerous. We go ahead and burn it in the closed stove.

[hrrunka]

Yep, the photo's fine now.

Keeping fungi and mold out of the firewood is not easy round here. A few logs ended up in one or other of our "habitat piles" up by the back boundary rather than in our log stack.

[murakozi]

How long will that last you?

[altivo]

Last winter we used about one cord for supplementary heating. We had a whole cord left (off the right edge of the photo, that rack holds two.) So this year we just refilled the empty space. Last year was milder than most we've experienced in our 23 years here.

House has a geothermal pump which does maintain 66 to 68 degrees F without help most days. We use the wood stove on nights when outside drops below 25 F or so.

[moonhare]

Do you cut and split? I periodically saw up ‘standing deadwood’ and wind fallen limbs. We only use the fireplace occasionally, though.

[altivo]

We do some occasionally. Gary can use a chainsaw, and has taken a safety class for it. I'm so sensitive to noise that I avoid the thing. We have a lot of fallen stuff stacked outside, as well as a pile of very large pieces from two trees we paid professionals to take down. Splitting is hard work using a maul and wedges, though. And the power splitters terrify me. I've seen how logs can almost explode in those. Generally we just buy one cord a year all split and kiln seasoned.