The Science of Wood Stacking

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Stacking Inside

Don't store green or punky, old water-logged wood in the cellar of a modern, airtight, and well-insulated house. Up to a half-ton of water per cord will evaporate out to make your ceilings sprout mold and the wallpaper peel. Fresh red oak or cherry or black (peppermint) birch can reek. And legions of tiny, hard-shelled bark beetles can emerge from any wood to buzz around the cellar to mate and look for live trees to lay their eggs in.

But if the wood is left to season for a year in the woods, aromatic oils will dissipate; live tree wildlife will move out; and salamanders, centipedes, and other decaying-wood critters won't move in, so the wood will be easy to live with. Always stack it loosely and up off the floor on pallets, grids of poles, or old lumber. And don't stack tightly against cellar walls. Air should be able to circulate all around to enhance drying and will keep earwigs, pill bugs, and spiders from multiplying horribly in wet wood trash littering the floor.

Despite what you may read elsewhere, termites or carpenter ants that might come in with firewood won't chew your house up; the queens that lay eggs are protected in nests deep underground. Any individual bugs you see (even big black ants carrying larvae or eggs around) are harmless and won't live long. Powder-post beetles dig networks of tiny tunnels between bark and wood but won't bother finished lumber or debarked logs. But if bugs worry you, leave a light on in the cellar and, over a concrete floor under the pile (or on plastic sheeting over a dirt floor), apply a generous sprinkling of a chlorine-type household scouring powder. Freshen the powder around the border of the woodpile once in a while after the wood is stacked. Bugs will avoid the light and the smell of chlorine and will burrow deep into the stack, staying there till they join their maker. Don't use an insecticide—spray or powder. Some bug poisons develop virulently toxic (if short-lived) dioxin compounds when exposed to high firebox heat. You don't want the fragrant smoke that escapes from any wood fire to be more hazardous to your lungs' health than it is naturally.

Uncle Will's Woodpile

My farming Great Uncle Will made it a point of pride to have the wood in and stacked well before the first hard frost in October. There were several cords of 4-ft logs ranged along the roadside fence, stove-length, unsplit sections filling one front bay of the barn, half-splits piled along each way between barn and house to turn the path from milking parlor to kitchen into a seasonal tunnel. Quarter-splits and kindling stacked were on pallets to fill the north end of the cellar. All of it was stacked square and even. Where exposed to public view, only the most perfectly round, freshly cut ends looked out on the road, the vertical face of each stack as flat and plumb and slick as any newly plastered wall. Indeed, the house looked almost walled in by firewood. Neighbors driving by would nod approvingly. Leaf-peeping tourists would stop to snap pictures. And, with all the wood stacked and his itch scratched, Will would go around looking mighty self-satisfied for a day or two. He'd glance up from his chores from time to time and comment to anyone within hearing. including the dog, any cat that was handy, or an adoring young grandnephew who'd been allowed to help stack, "Yep. We'll stay warm this winter. Now the wood's in."

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