Firewood storage

[hutchman]

Now you guys are scaring me! I'm in the planning stages of our new house and my plan was to have a boiler room in the basement where the wood gasification furnace and water tanks for thermal storage would go. Was planning on having a double door to the outside where I could use the tractor to drop pallets of wood just inside the door. The gasification furnace requires wood to be at a certain moisture content so all the youtube videos I've seen have folks keeping a few cords of seasoned wood (that dried somewhere else) in the boiler room for a few weeks to hit the final moisture content level and then rotate the properly dried stuff through the furnace.

I didn't think about bugs or critters. So I'm inviting chaos if I store wood indoors?

There would be an inside door to the boiler room in the basement too so when you need to fire up you don't have to walk outside to get to it. I originally thought of one of those outdoor wood boilers but the family isn't too keen on that if I'm not around. They aren't going to go out in the cold night in rain or snow to throw a log on.

 

[TnAndy]

Been using the basement as pictured for 30 years and never had a problem. Can't guarantee you won't, but I think the potential problems are overrated. Will you get a few beetles and spiders ? Sure. Part of life. You want sterile, move into a space craft.

 

[hutchman]

Just did some reading up on the hearth.com site. Sounds like lots of folks do what I was planning. Appears the key is having the wood properly seasoned before bringing it indoors.

The room I'm planning on doing this in will be specifically built for this purpose (wood boiler room) so hopefully if there are bugs they won't actually be getting into the house.

 

[mbohuntr]

I built these to move wood from the sheds to a my greenhouse and shop. I figure they hold a 1/3 of a cord, heaped up a little, and 1000-1200lbs full. You could cut this down to 32" tall (keeping modular cuts on the expanded metal to avoid waste) instead of 48, and get in the 600-700lb range.

That's a little closer to what I need, I need the bucket on the tractor for snow removal, so I'm going to put some clamp on forks on it near the ends for strength. Thanks!

 

[TnAndy]

Hutchman,

One thing you might consider instead of a pair of swinging doors is a regular roll up garage door, then put an opener on it. That's the way mine is setup....(in fact, I have a multi button opener that does the main house garage, the basement door, the shop door, and the main entrance gate).... and it's nice to be able to drive up to the door, hit the opener from the tractor seat, and roll on in, or at least set your pallet in the door, then back away.

You may not appreciate the effort save now (OK, call it laziness if you will...ahahahaa...but there is PLENTY of work to do without creating the dang stuff !) but trust me, when you hit your 60's-70's, and you keep putting off that "parts replacement surgery", every time you have to get up and down off the seat, you WILL appreciate it !

 

[TnAndy]

That's a little closer to what I need, I need the bucket on the tractor for snow removal, so I'm going to put some clamp on forks on it near the ends for strength. Thanks!

Put yourself a quick attach deal on your loader so you can flip two levers, and switch between forks and bucket in 30 seconds. BEST move you'll ever make, doubles the use of your front loader. Forks are more handy than a bucket. And bucket mounted forks lose a lot of lifting capacity by moving the load out the distance of the bucket.

There is a whole thread going on using forks here on TBN......go check it out.

 

[Parkanzky]

We made a new rack this past weekend:

Untitled by parkanzky

Untitled by parkanzky, on Flickr

Way overbuilt, but it's out of steel he had laying around.

 

[hutchman]

Hutchman,

One thing you might consider instead of a pair of swinging doors is a regular roll up garage door, then put an opener on it. That's the way mine is setup....(in fact, I have a multi button opener that does the main house garage, the basement door, the shop door, and the main entrance gate).... and it's nice to be able to drive up to the door, hit the opener from the tractor seat, and roll on in, or at least set your pallet in the door, then back away.

You may not appreciate the effort save now (OK, call it laziness if you will...ahahahaa...but there is PLENTY of work to do without creating the dang stuff !) but trust me, when you hit your 60's-70's, and you keep putting off that "parts replacement surgery", every time you have to get up and down off the seat, you WILL appreciate it !

Yea, thats the kind of stuff I'm thinking about. Spent the last 20yrs in a 2 story house with bedrooms all upstairs. New place is going to be all one level and Lord willing be my last house so I'm trying to do things smarter than harder. Don't want to handle the wood more than necessary.

Our shipping department at work uses those big saran wrap type rolls to secure lots of stacked small boxes on a pallet. I was actually thinking of using that to secure firewood to pallets. Kind of like a low tech version of that video in the 'tractors and wood' thread where a net is wrapped around a barrel full of wood as it lifts off.

 

[Looking4new]

A couple of house geckos will solve the spider and bug problem and also give the cats exercise.

 

[dmccarty]

Now you guys are scaring me! I'm in the planning stages of our new house and my plan was to have a boiler room in the basement where the wood gasification furnace and water tanks for thermal storage would go. Was planning on having a double door to the outside where I could use the tractor to drop pallets of wood just inside the door. The gasification furnace requires wood to be at a certain moisture content so all the youtube videos I've seen have folks keeping a few cords of seasoned wood (that dried somewhere else) in the boiler room for a few weeks to hit the final moisture content level and then rotate the properly dried stuff through the furnace.

I didn't think about bugs or critters. So I'm inviting chaos if I store wood indoors?
...

EVERY wood pile I have had, and I do mean EVERY, has had at least one mouse nest. Insects don't bother me that much and we will get some bugs that will climb out of the buckets I used to bring firewood into the house. The bugs will warm up in the house and start moving around. Not really a problem. Heck, we get spiders that get into the house without using the firewood as a transport. We even get Geckos as well. Not really sure how the survive the cold but they show up in the house a couple times a year, usually in winter.

If you could build the boiler room to be made completely out of concrete, brick or block, and with no place for mice to hide other than the wood pile, maybe you would be ok. Putting out mouse poison would be a good idea that is for sure.

Your wifey will NOT be happy if the mice get in the house, climb into the linen closet and piss and sh....it over every clean towel and sheet. I sure was not happy and it took days to wash everything again.

Later,
Dan

 

[hutchman]

Was planning on the boiler room having block walls. The door going to the inside of the basement would be a steel outdoor rated door with the weather strips that would hopefully keep bugs from getting into basement from boiler room.

I'm sure I'll have to do some kind of sealing around the floor joists above.

The roll door idea is growing on me. It would maximize space as I'd have to keep an area clear if I used the double doors to swing in and if I got the swing out type, a good snow (rare around here but it does happen at least once every few years) would keep them from opening out.

Roll door has none of those issues.

I'd just have to find an insulated one.

 

[Walkin Horse]

I've got an old 3 bay shed that was here when I got here. I started to tear it down but I have reinforced it a little. I figure if it falls I can flip the top off of it. I have about 2 more years stacked near the house that I'm tired of looking at. Plus fighting to keep it covered up. Now I bring the logs right here cutem and splitem and stack. What's piled up I had cut somewhere else. It's mostly out of site so I don't have to worry about the mess. I figure 1 bay will last me a year so after I get it full I can just cycle back around and that will give me three years of cured wood.

 

[RedNeckGeek]

JMER817, your idea for a concrete boiler room sounds perfect for use with palletized wood. Using a roll up door would eliminate problems trying to swing open double doors over a snow packed entryway or into what promises to be a crowded room. I just started heating with wood last fall, and during the summer bucked, split, and stacked ten cords of oak onto pallet racks made with scrap lumber. It was very handy being able to put the wood onto the pallet right from the splitter or saw buck, and not touch it again until it was moved to the stove. Each 40"x48" pallet holds a little less than a half cord, and I move them around with a set of forks on QD mounts on the tractor. If my tractor was any smaller I'd have gone with a 30"x48" pallet and just stacked one row on it for less weight. A couple turns of pallet wrap up near the top keeps the wood in place while it's being moved, and is available fairly inexpensively at the local Harbor Freight. The pallets are parked under a tarp for now, and I bring one into the garage when needed. Lots of Decon pellets under the tarp, and a couple of packets on the one in the garage, too. They must work because I haven't seen any mice yet, but a few crickets have hitch hiked in. Made up a dolly with scrap steel that holds enough wood for a few days. It measures 2'x2'x5' and when loaded it's just about all the weight I'd want to try to move. Biggest problem for me is that the path from the wood stack to the garage isn't very level, and I lost a few loads off the pallets before I started using the pallet wrap. That and I have to remember to fold the ROPS on the tractor or it'll rearrange the top of the garage door opening.

 

[Garandman]

Very nice setup TnAndy.
I store wood outside for a year before moving a hay wagon - 2 cords- into the basement near the wood furnace. Having it in the same room as the furnace for a spell does a great job on the final drying of the wood so it burns nicely. If I've been ambitious I might have 4 or 5 cords in the final drying.

One of the guys here uses his basement wood pile as a thermal mass. He has a vent from the furnace that dries and warms the wood, and once warmed up it helps keep the area at a more steady temperature.

 

[s219]

One of the guys here uses his basement wood pile as a thermal mass. He has a vent from the furnace that dries and warms the wood, and once warmed up it helps keep the area at a more steady temperature.

Not sure how much thermal benefit he'll get from wood though! It's very poor at holding temperature. I remember studying the thermal mass of typical building materials when designing a home once, and an all-wood structure will track changes in ambient temperature very closely, with little time delay or temperature difference.

 

[jbbankshot]

I store my wood in bins in a pavilion. I can stack two high and 24 total. I use forks on my JD 3320 to bring a bin to the garage where I have a dolly that can hold the whole bin. This greatly reduce the effort required to keep a fire burning.

 

[hutchman]

I like it! Are those those totes that had the 275 gal or so plastic tank in them at one time?

I store my wood in bins in a pavilion. I can stack two high and 24 total. I use forks on my JD 3320 to bring a bin to the garage where I have a dolly that can hold the whole bin. This greatly reduce the effort required to keep a fire burning.

 

[jbbankshot]

I like it! Are those those totes that had the 275 gal or so plastic tank in them at one time?

No, they are just foldable stackable metal bins.

 

[Tenn_Blue]

Some really nice systems some of you guys have! Ours is pretty simple in comparison. We use wood as our primary heat for the main house area via a free standing wood stove. Central furnace is the supplemental system.

I have a 10 x12 old metal shed in the dogs yard - 25 yards or so from the house. That's my wood shed. I put a couple air vents in the roof and the warm summers help dry the wood out for next winter. I stack around the outer walls and build center isles so I have access to it all. Use a first in/first out rotation, coupled with our normally mild winters let me get enough wood in there to last a couple years use. Once the shed is full, I stack/cover un-split wood outside the fence in cord frames, then split it when it goes into the shed when there is room.

Then we keep a week or so of wood on the front porch out of the weather, and a day or two worth stacked by the stove in the house. The porch and house wood gets cycled enough that we don't have rodent problems... I load up the golf cart or tractor bucket once a week or so to bring wood from the shed to porch, and bring what we need into the house by hand as needed - only about 15 feet or so...

 

[eddie48]

A lot of good ideas, so far.
Some time ago, when I was putting wood into my woodstove in the basement, I realized that I recognized the knot on a particular peice of wood; could remember cutting that particular tree, sawing it into 4 foot peices to dry, cutting into smaller peices to split, splitting, stacking, moving to the house and now putting it into the stove. I realized that I was handling the wood way too many times.

Since then, my goal has been to try to be more efficient. I use the tractor to hold the logs for cutting and put the split wood directly into a large dump wagon. Wood from the dump wagon is stacked under the back porch to dry (I can stack 2years worth of wood there). Right next to the wood stacks, I built a woodbox against the basement concrete wall and cut a hole through the wall to the inside, about 8 feet from the woodstove. I lift the lid on the woodbox (on the outside) and put about 1-1/2 days worth of wood inside, then close the lid. Then I can open a door inside and take the wood out to put in the stove, as needed. Saves lots of steps and time and, more importantly, I don't have to let in the cold air when I bring in wood.