Fire Wood Burners

[Dave Fritz]

We have a number of saw mill close and they sell the outer slabs taken off the trees they harvest. I'm getting older and realizing they would be much easier to cut into stove lengths and burn than dropping a tree, bucking it up, and splitting. I realize the heat value may not be as good due to burning bark and not much heart wood. I wonder if anyone has used slabs for heat and what your experience has been.

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

Quite common here. As long as conifer wood is not included. My local mill gets $20 for a pile that will fill an 8 ft bed of a pickup. problem, it is not seasoned. Could include wood that was just cut last week. We heated our old farm house for 12 years with an out door wood burning boiler. Nive part about it was that I could easily burn pine, spruce, punky stuff, green wood, etc. Better yet, the door was 24 inches by 24 inches and the firebox was 36 inches deep. I never split any wood. If it fit in the door, it went in as is. Other wise, I just cut it smaller.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Way back in 1987, the first Winter we lived in our new house with a wood burner fireplace, I bought a 3 cord load of slabs. $50 delivered and dumped in the driveway.
I went out and bought an electric chainsaw and got to work cutting the slabs down to about 18 inches long.
It took a month - working after work and on my days off - to cut the pile down to size.

The first two years we just had a fire in the fireplace every once in a while. The third year, I had quit work to go back to school. We turned the furnace down to 55 degrees and used a combination of the fireplace, a kerosene heater and what heat cooking and the shower provided - to heat the whole house.

If the price is right and you don't mind the work of cutting the slabs to size, they work ok.

[John K Jordan]

We have a number of saw mill close and they sell the outer slabs taken off the trees they harvest. I'm getting older and realizing they would be much easier to cut into stove lengths and burn than dropping a tree, bucking it up, and splitting. I realize the heat value may not be as good due to burning bark and not much heart wood. I wonder if anyone has used slabs for heat and what your experience has been.

I haven’t burned them much in my wood stove in the house but I have had people come repeatedly to my sawmill to get loads waste wood for heating. I gave them away to save the effort of burning or disposing them - if you ask around some smaller sawmills might give them away. Might check on the Woodmizer web site or look at Woodfinder.com (or check craigslist) to find small mill operators in your part of the country.

I’m certainly no expert but here are some things I can thing of:
The slabs would dry much quicker than thicker pieces of split firewood.
Everyone I know who heats with firewood burns bark. https://www.firewood-for-life.com/firewood-bark.html
I would never pine or other softwoods in my wood-burning stove.
I read a gov publication once that said all wood, heart or sapwood, has about the same amount of heat value for the same dry weight. It just takes less higher-density wood.

Burning some slabs when wet will still work fine but some heat is lost from boiling off the water. However, too much moisture can contribute to a buildup of creosote in the chimney which could eventually lead to a chimney fire. Almost no one lets split firewood dry completely, which can take years, so a good defense is to have a chimney sweep clean the chimney every year.

You could collect the slabs and stack loosely to allow air movement and let this year’s slabs dry for next winter. Keeping the bottom of the stack off the ground will avoid decay. They will dry quickly in the summer sun!

JKJ

[Jim Becker]

Species matters but it will burn just the same as splitting up a whole log. The bigger/wider pieces of wane are going to provide splits that are more like you'll get from the bigger process; smaller wane is going to produce sticks more like kindling. Ash is very flexible with seasoning for sure but as has been noted as long as it's hardwoods you should be good. Avoid softwoods like pine for sure other than for "firestarter" toothpicks.

[Zachary Hoyt]

I burned all the slabs from our sawmill in the wood gasification boiler at the farm for about 15 years. Slabs are great to burn, but they burn up faster since there's a lot of air space between them, so for overnights I'd want something heavier. I cut about 6-8,000 board feet a year, typically, and needed about 20-23 standards cords (60-70 face cords) per year so I had to cut a lot of other firewood to fill up the sheds. The word on the new woodstoves is that they can burn softwoods equally safely as hardwoods, but they need to be well seasoned too. The local firewood supplier I found sells mostly beech and some maple, all hardwood, but if I could find a source of softwood firewood and the price was right I'd buy some to season.

[Bruce Wrenn]

Before backyard fire pits, local sawyer gave away slabs during summer. Not any more. We have cooked more than one pig on slabs of oak and hickory.

[Bill Dufour]

In California there is a big business in selling the bark off of redwood trees. I thin kit is water jetted off then shredded. Sold as gorilla hair for garden mulch. Old growth trees the bark can be 2' thick. Similar to sawdust or peatmoss. Being redwood, it does not rot very fast and use soil nutrients to rot away.
BilL D.

[Dave Fritz]

I can't blame the mills for trying to get the most value out of their work. I used to purchase trailer loads of bark mulch from a small mill, now they won't even talk to me as they sell it to a large company that takes it by the semi load. Why mess around, time is money. We do have several smaller Amish mills that have become friends and they'll work with me. We also have a local weekly wood auction held at a sales barn. You purchase the load, haul it home, unload it and return the trailer, manure spreader etc. Probably want to buy it a year ahead and season it for a year.

[Alex Zeller]

When I was a kid my father would buy about 3 cords worth of slab wood every year. He would pay me to cut it up. It was about the only wood his McCulloch Mini Mac would cut through. It would take me what felt like a month to cut through the stack. But there was no splitting. I don't miss that task at all.

[Steve Demuth]

For a few years when I was traveling internationally all the time for work, I burned slabs from a saw mill. I figured the convenience of having them delivered right to my driveway would save me time, which was for me very much in short supply. It did make it easier - no trecking to the woods, bucking and splitting, loading and unloading. But it was time consuming as all get out. You gotta cut a lot of slabs to fill the woodshed, and then you have to move all those pieces. One year I went real cheap and got bundles that included what they called trims - basically 1 X 2ish sticks that came off the straight line rip saw, mixed in with the side slabs. It was awful. Basically, everything was kindling.

It all made for nice, hot day and evening fires. You couldn't load a stove with them for overnight burning though - way too much surface area, and the fire would get insanely hot and intense.

I gave up after 3 years.

[scott lipscomb]

I burn all of mine in my wood stove, bark and all, fir and oak. Burns just like the rest of tree. I don't notice any difference. Some folks seem to have a preference for this or that wood. It honestly doesn't make that much difference in my book and the wood stove is the primary heat for my house.