How Much Wood Ya'll Reckon a fellow Needs?

I have a mind to stock about 10 chords of wood this summer to heat my older home. The main floor is about 1950 square feet, and I reckon I'll burn nigh on 4 chords in what would be a cold winter for our area, but I've never heated this place with all wood before.

Any thoughts?

When I talk about burning wood, I tend to dream of year's gone by and talk like Alvin C. York. :|

"Cords".

Living where you live I'd probably start with a minimum of 4 cords, but I hate the cold.

Yeah, 4-5 cord should get you thru an average winter.

Cool beans. I like moving this stuff around. It brings out the Scotsman in me.

I suppose the worst I can do is get too much wood and then be able to make some extra money selling it before Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Valentine's Day.

But remember, you have to determine how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

Are you using it as your primary heat source? I've got a fireplace in my family room, but it's not the primary heat source, so we rarely use it--maybe 2-3x per Winter. I go thru maybe a cord every 2-3 years at most.

When I lived in Wisconsin (long winters, lakes frozen over from late November to mid April) our only heat was a wood burning stove. But I was a teenager, so I wasn't really tracking how many cords we went through. BTW are you talking about full cords or face cords? And be careful burning tamarack (if that grows where you live). That wood burns so insanely hot it can get out of control very fast!

@Eccentric would have good info on this.

The goal would be to use it as the primary heat source.

I'll be using a centrally located stove. Most of what I have so far is red oak. I split two cords (not face cords, actual cords) on Saturday and I'm getting mixed signals. The boys up in New England say, on the internet, that you need 4 years to dry it adequately. The boys down in Mississippi say you need only a summer.

My dad burns a lot of firewood, and usually lets his logs "season" for a year, FWIW.

He usually takes down the trees and splits the logs in the Fall (~October year X) and then burns them starting the second Winter (~December year X+1).

I think at least a summer will be needed in the area, good point Nautica. However, a lot of people claim that you need much longer than that for Oak to dry, even in the south.

Oak is quite dense, so that makes sense to me. Up North, they say 3 or 4 summers is needed. I think I'll give mine a summer outdoors, and then move the oak into the barn that fall. I already have a couple "mixed" cords from last year that should be good for this winter.

enough to build a cabin.

We generally dried ours two years.

Makes sense. The logs my dads uses are generally hickory, not oak.

Yeah. The weird thing is that hickory is denser than oak, but people generally say to age it a year.

I do know one thing: aging is important. Not just for less smoke, but for heat output. I've seen studies stating that if wood were adequately dried, people could burn 30 to 40% less wood. Like one redneck put it, "I ain't never seen water burn." Less aged wood will burn longer, but who cares? It smokes more, it goobers up your chimney, etc.

I guess I'll probably age the wood outdoors the first year and then move it in the barn. I have no idea how much I can fit in the barn as I haven't measured it. If I had to guess, probably 20+ cords? It's a small barn. I guess it will soon be a woodshed.

If you need wood to stay warm in the winter, then you need a minimum of 5 cords. Ten is way better.

I'm guessing the guys in Mississippi don't have quite as much experience needing winter heat as New Englanders on any given winter day.

The words in this thread make no sense to someone in South Florida.