It´s cold outside, and if you haven´t done your firewood it´s about time. It´s true what they say: The firewood makes you warm more than once. It´s a lot of work, but when the cold winter comes, you realize it was worth it.
Time to do some firewood
As for me, I´m living in a town with district heating so others fire for me. One of the town’s heating plants are in sight from my balcony. It´s a papermill (in the center of town!) that has a wood pellet fueled heating plant that helps keeping me, and the other town folks warm.
There is another big, combined heat and power plant outside town that we wrote about here at NordicWoodJournal.com. That one has two boilers, one for wood chips, and one for municipal waste.
I do firewood anyway
So, I´m the lucky one(?) as I don´t have to make firewood. Well, I am the lucky one, because I can choose to make firewood if I want to, and I do. Last week I helped a friend cutting some wood in the forest for him to take home, cut, and split for the next winter.
I used to do lots of firewood for my parents, who lived in the forest, until they decided to invest in geothermal heating. After that, they only needed small volumes for the tiled stoves, and for the old kitchen stove that they had kept after they modernized the house in the 90’s.
Professional firewood making
I can´t say that I was professional in my firewood making. As I am an old logger, I always preferred to use the chainsaw for cutting, and I always did that directly in the pile.
As for splitting, my dad invested in a hydraulic wood splitter. It was ok for him as he was close to 80 at the time, but I used an ax. It was both fun, and masculine. It was wonderful to see the size of the pile of split wood by the end of the day and feel that you really were worth a beer in the evening. I must admit, however, that I left the tricky wood pieces to dad and the splitter.
If you have firewood heating, and don´t want to, or can, do your own firewood, there are professional firewood makers. I visited one of those, and wrote an article about it that you can read here.
I also wrote about a couple of small, but smart, accessories that can be helpful in your firewood making. Read about them here, and here.
Good luck with your firewood making out there. Make sure that the number of fingers, and other limbs, are the same when you are finished as they were when you started.
Photos: Per Jonsson
