The weight of Firewood

Yukon firewood is sold by the cord which, as everybody knows, is 4’x 4’ x 8’ or 128 cubic feet. Big companies such as sawmills, pulp mills and lumber producers buy and sell wood by weight using a very simple universal formula to calculate the value of the wood. Professional scalers know exactly how much each kind of tree is worth, from the heaviest (white oak at 5,580 lbs per cord) to the lightest which are larch pines weighing about ten pounds each.

According to Wikipedia, you will find the most common trees sold as firewood in the Yukon Taiga described thusly:

“Boreal forests occur in the more southern parts of the taiga ecoregion that spreads across the northern parts of the world. The boreal forest zone consists of closed-crown conifer forests with a conspicuous deciduous element. The proportions of the dominant conifers (white and black spruces, jack pine, tamarack larch and balsam fir) vary greatly in response to interactions among climate, topography, soil, fire, pests, and perhaps other factors including floods.”

After researching several other wood-buying sites, we averaged everything out and came up with these figures for the approximate weights of a cord of Yukon firewood: 4,250 lbs for green and 4,050 lbs for seasoned.

Any wood cut down between April 1 and Oct. 31 and dried for a minimum of two months can be sold as seasoned. Everything else is considered green. Any wood dried over six months under the midnight sun in summer is considered aged. All that coffee shop chatter about firekill vs beetle-kill is just Joe-talk between sips and bites. It doesn’t matter what killed the tree as much as when it happened.https://www.whatsupyukon.com/yukon-lifestyle/health-wellness/fitness-by-firewood/

The optimum amount of moisture content in firewood for maximum heat is 20 to 25 per cent depending on which source you trust.

In summary, our almost 11 cords of split and stacked firewood for the winter of 2022 weighed in at slightly more than 23.75 tons or 47,500 lbs.

That should satisfy just about anybody’s definition of a good summer workout …at least for a 75–year–old former working man with a worn-out Yukon back.

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