When your looking for firewood there are two things you need to look for to be sure you are getting a great load of wood. The most important is the process and time used to season the firewood, which we discussed in our article on how we season our firewood. The second most important thing to ensure you get a great load of firewood is the type of wood. With a wide variety of trees growing here in North Carolina and all of them tending to look fairly similar we decided to go over which hardwoods we choose to use here at Mark’s Firewood for our seasoned firewood and why.
We use five kinds of tree’s; red oak, white oak, hickory, ash, and poplar. Our decision to use these five species for our firewood was no easy task. We looked at things like ease of access to the wood, ease of splitting, heat output when burned, the amount of sparking when burned, and the amount of smoking when burning. It took years of trial and error to figure out that the five species we use are the best choices for firewood in the North Carolina area. These days with the abundance of information online we were able to find a great chart from Utah State University that breaks down what we learned from trial and error. Here are the charts from their site:
*Please note that not all of the trees listed are native to or even grow in North Carolina.
As you can see the five types of wood we use all provide a great quality fire with a high heat output. The chart is a great resource because it shows you there are many types of hardwoods out there that will make good firewood they just are not very prevalent so we do not see them or use them very often for our firewood. The chart does however list three different types of pine as burnable. We strongly recommend that you DO NOT BURN PINE OF ANY KIND INSIDE YOUR HOME! It causes an excess build up of creosote in your chimney which is a major fire hazard. Pine can be burned outside in a fire-pit with no negative consequences.
As always we hope this article was helpful and at least a little educational.
If you have any questions about the article or would like to order some of our all hardwood seasoned firewood email us at Mark@MarksFirewood.com or call 980.579.8655.
