What wood you burn

Last month I paid $140 for chimney cleaning, $12 to have my axe and splitting maul sharpened and $28 to replace the handles on the sledge hammer and the axe after I broke them.

I felt almost like the guy in the old joke who goes out and buys a pickup truck, a chain saw and a wood stove, then builds a big shed to store the wood, so he could save on his heating bill. My adventure as a wood scavenger has been a little cheaper. I'm afraid of chainsaws since I saw a friend take 108 stitches across the face when his kicked back on him. I sold my only pickup back in '86.

The house "in the country" came with a high-efficiency Vermont Castings Vigilant model wood stove in the living room. Ever since we moved in, I've felt I had no choice but to try heating with wood. Last winter I wasn't quite ready. We had just moved in and had only a few logs lying around. After we burned those up, I bought the tiny $4.99 pre-split bundles of logs swaddled in plastic in front of Harris Teeter. Despite the temporary nice glow, it didn't feel very much in the pioneer spirit.

There are a lot of old sawed up logs lying around the neighborhood but most of it is pine; it's been on the ground a long time, so there's probably not much heat value there. Besides, it's rotten. Then there's some worry about air pollution.

Last December I looked at the first year's worth of electric bills and calculated that the spikes in winter kilowatt hours added up to over $500 and it hadn't even been that cold a winter. So I promptly forgot about air pollution, put in a programmable thermostat, slapped an insulating jacket on the water heater and on the pipes in the crawl space and went on a wood quest.

My friend Jim had his land cleared last year and thoughtfully had the wood cut into 15 inch lengths. We drove out and gathered a Subaru wagon load one Sunday.

Jim's stuff wasn't split and it was the much lighter poplar, not the classic oak firewood. Nonetheless, the price was right. Home it came. We tried burning the smaller pieces whole along with kindling I picked up in the neighborhood woods. Well God was smart when s/he designed the tree with bark on the outside and a tightly wound core. The stuff just didn't burn very well, no matter how skinny it was.

I unearthed my old splitting maul, sledgehammer and axe to improve the poplar's surface-to-volume ratio. I quickly found out just how out of shape my back and arms really were, but swinging the axe and sledge got enough for the first few fires and a little bit of arm and back strength returned. Imbued with confidence, I promptly got another Sunday Subaru wagon load from Jim.

Just after the New Year I got serious, dragging and tossing a bunch of logs up toward the splitting stump and whacking away at them until I had what I thought was a pretty good pile. Turns out, it lasted about four days and I busted the axe handle and the sledge handle ... didn't know my own strength. Check that, more like my aim was so poor I missed the log one too many times and hit it with the handle. Even a nice hickory handle can only take so many shots.

So far I've spent over $400 this year saving money on the heating bill. I do my best to crank the stove every cold night after getting home from work, even slipping home at lunch to split some wood. Greenish poplar, cut last year, isn't the same as seasoned oak, so it can take a good 45 minutes and some serious work with the bellows to get a good flame going. My wife and I spend a lot of time discussing the nuances of fire-building, while staring through the stove window at the crackling, jumping yellow and orange flames. When it's 20 degrees out, that radiant wood heat feels pretty good.

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