Wood

 

48", square-pallet. I am guessing about half of a face cord on that pallet.

My fireplace insert burns about four-and-a-half pounds of wood an hour or about 2kg. The pile of wood on that pallet will weigh about 600 pounds after drying which pencils out to 130 hours of burn-time. 

Green Wood

I cut a wedge out of a 6" diameter round and dried it in the microwave. I learned that freshly cut, October Black Locust is 37% water-by-weight.

According to the internet, that means that I can expect 10.6 MJ/kg of wood in heat if I burned it "green". If I dry it down to 12% moisture, the net heat jumps up to 15.8 MJ/kg which is almost 50% higher. 20% moisture is about 14 MJ/kg.

The real issue with green wood isn't the loss of heating value, it is condensate in the chimney and incomplete combustion. Those two combine to create flammable deposits inside of the chimney and, in time, chimney fires. 

Other almost-useless information

The technique for using a microwave to determine the dry-matter content of pasture grasses or the moisture content of wood is to place a weighed sample in a ceramic or corelle ware bowl and microwave it for a short period. My sample started out at 372 gargoyles so I microwaved it for 4 minutes.

Then I weighed it. After that, I microwaved it in 2 minute increments and weighed it each time. The weight of the sample dropped 36g, 22g, 36g, 27g and then 17g. The hot wood filled the kitchen with the smell of Mexican street corn.

I started to microwave it one more time but I could smell scorching and I terminated the dehydration. 

Wind

My plan had been to drop another Black Locust today but the wind was gusting in the mid-20 mph range. The tree is easily twice as big as the one I cut yesterday.

Discretion is the better part of valor so I postponed the mission.

It looks like Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday will be excellent days to drop trees based on the predicted winds

I not only have Black Locust to cut, I have White Pines and Black Walnuts to thin out. 

They are all on the Eaton Rapids property. Given the fact that Saturday will be both not windy and Quicksilver will not be here, it makes sense to just drop the trees and buck-them to size some other day.

Some of the Black Locust are leaning over a fence, so I will drop the fence from the fence-posts before I cut those trees.

I really miss having cows, but it is much easier to do this kind of maintenance when they are not on the property.