Splitting firewood cuts down the size of the logs. How Else does Splitting Firewood Help It Burn? Photo by from Pexels But letting it migrate out the sides by exposing areas not covered in bark helps tremendously. Water migrates best along the length of the log, so cutting logs to short lengths is crucially important. A quartered log has 39% more exposed surface area on the long faces than a whole round log, and that area makes a huge difference. Splitting firewood also exposes the inner surfaces, unlike peeling. A good solid splitting maul can split most firewood in one blow. It’s much easier to split wood, with an axe, maul, or wedges than to peel the bark off. The glue between the fibers, however, isn’t nearly so strong. Those fibers are very strong, and so is the bond of the bark to the wood. With wet wood this won’t work, as the water blocks your air passing through. In fact, with short lengths of very dry wood, you can dip one end in soap and blow through the other end to blow bubbles. We want the water to exit firewood, so we need to expose some surface area of uncovered wood.Īs previously mentioned, wood fibers are like bundles of very thin straws. So Why Split the Firewood? Photo by Mikey Dabro from Pexelsīark is like the skin of trees, and one of its major jobs is holding water inside. Drier wood that’s rich in resin and oils burns much better than the outer layers of wet sapwood. It also tends to contain more resin for rot-resistance, especially in conifers. Heartwood is usually drier than the rest of the thickness of the trunk because it’s not transporting water and sap. As trees age and trunks thicken, the innermost sapwood dies off, transitioning to heartwood. The living outer layers of wood, the sapwood, bring water and nutrients up the tree. The inner layers of bark transport energy down the tree to the roots for storage. Where is the Water Concentrated in Wood? Image by 5598375 from PixabayĪ tree trunk is made up of several layers of bark, the sapwood, and, if the tree is large enough, the heartwood. Before the wood can be brought anywhere near the temperatures needed to burn, a very large amount of energy must be spent just boiling off the water. Its fibers start full of liquid water, held in place by the capillary action of the small tubular cells. The cup did not burn until the water was gone. My chemistry teacher demonstrated this by folding a paper cup, filling it with water, and holding a blowtorch to it. In fact, taking one gram of water from just above freezing all the way up to boiling requires 418 Joules of energy input, but vaporizing that same gram from 100☌ water to 100☌ steam requires 2200 Joules, over five times as much!Īnything in close contact with enough liquid water will also not heat up much above boiling. Phase changes, like liquid to gas, require much more. Flashing back to high school chemistry, the amount of energy to raise one gram of water 1 ☌ is 4.18 Joule, but that “specific heat”, as it’s called, only applies to liquid water. The energy required to vaporize water into steam is tremendous. You can’t raise the temperature of liquid water above 100 ☌ without a pressure chamber. Water boils (at sea level) at 100 ☌ (212 ☏). Water boiling out of an unseasoned oak log at a sap boil
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