The firewood is finished

This time of year, a critical fall chore in rural areas is to get firewood put up for the winter. In the Lewis household, this chore often falls on me since I don't mind splitting and stacking, and it frees Don up to do more complicated projects.

I started by assessing our woodshed in mid-August. This space was mostly empty and had accumulated a variety of things we tucked in to keep them out of the rain over the spring and summer, including the oversized canvas umbrella I used while picking blueberries.

Also – and crucially – in the woodshed was located the manual hydraulic log splitter. Our gas-powered log splitter had been stranded on the other side of the property with a flat (actually, destroyed) tire, so through late spring we had been using the manual splitter to split firewood.

Late last fall, we had ordered a few extra cords of firewood to supplement what we already had on hand, just in case it was needed to get us over the winter. As it turned out, the firewood was fairly green (not dry) and the splits were huge, far too large to fit into our stove. In short, the entire delivery would have to be resplit, and even then the wood was too green for effective use unless the stove was already very hot.

We tried to make the best of it by stacking some of the smaller pieces in the woodshed, but soon gave up. The wood pieces were simply too large and too green  to use. So the majority of the pile sat there, tarped but unstacked, all winter long. Over the summer we untarped the pile to let the wood dry out, which it did very nicely.

Now that I was tasked with firewood, the first thing I did was examine the wood that was already in the woodshed, much of which was too large to burn (but at least it was dried out).

I used the manual log splitter to split it down to size...

...then restacked everything. I concentrated on stacking everything as tightly as possible, and up to the absolute rafters.

Meanwhile we finally got a replacement tire on the (gas-powered) log splitter, so we towed it around to the front of the house, and I settled in to resplit the cords of firewood that had been drying out for the last year.

I kept the canvas umbrella in the woodshed, since at this point (late August) I was still harvesting blueberries and needed it for shade.

The blueberries finally petered out, so I moved the umbrella back into the barn and started stacking firewood in earnest.

Once the pile of wood was resplit and all stacked up, we started moving miscellaneous wood from the barn side of the house to the front where the log splitter was. These were rounds that had been harvested from dead trees we'd taken down.

We loaded these into a box Don built to go on the back of the tractor, and pulled them around to the log splitter.

This left me with plenty more wood to split.

Some of the rounds were enormous. These were the monsters we tried to tackle with the manual log splitter without success. The gas-powered splitter conquered them with very little effort.

As the weeks went by, I split and stacked everything I could lay my hands on. It was my goal to get that woodshed stuffed to the brim.

Row by row, I built up our supply.

However when everything we had on hand was split, we were well short of that goal of having a stuffed woodshed. So ... we ordered one more cord of rounds, just to fill in the gaps.

Splitting that last cord only took two or three days of working a couple hours at a time.

Second-to-last row...

As I wound down on the splitting, I was also playing a game with how much gas was left in the log splitter. I wanted to use it all up so we wouldn't have to drain the splitter before putting it away for the winter. But it was a fine balance, because I wanted to use that gas power to split the bigger rounds. So I pulled every remaining large round out of the pile...

...and carted them over to the splitter.

As it turned out, the gas in the splitter ran out just as I finished splitting the largest rounds. So I turned to the manual splitter to finish the batch.

And that was it for splitting.

I had an enormous pile of split wood needing to be stacked. The question was how much of it would fit into the shed. All? Most? Would there still be room in the shed?

I stacked and stacked. When each row reached the top of the shed, I played Tetris to see how many wood pieces I could shove into any available opening.

Almost finished...

Success! The woodshed is filled side to side, back to front, top to bottom. Based on the dimensions, Don calculates that we have almost five cords of wood, plenty to get us through even the harshest of winters. To me, a full woodshed is a thing of beauty.

There was a fair bit of leftover firewood. It took three loads in the Gorilla cart...

...and I stacked it on the back porch. This will be the first firewood we use this winter.

Now it was time for the cleanup. I had been tossing kindling-sized pieces into a pile...

...so I gathered them up and put them in a bin on the back porch for easy access.

I raked up the bark and other debris...

...and loaded it into the Gorilla cart. I pulled the cart into the pasture to dump it in a pile to be composted down. The cows instantly came to investigate. "Is it edible?"

This left the area in front of the woodshed nice and tidy. We'll tuck the log splitter away shortly.

The very last thing we'll do is hang a tarp loosely over the front of the woodshed to discourage rain and snow from blowing onto the wood. But for now – the firewood is finished!

Product Review Monday

Have you ever thought what it would be like to live like the Amish? I don't mean just being off-grid or giving up a car; I mean really living like (and with) the Amish?

One man, Eric Brende, and his newlywed wife Mary, did just that ... and wrote about it. They lived for 18 months with a religious group that goes even beyond the Amish in terms of technology (or the lack thereof). Brende's story is called "Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology" and it's an extraordinary read.

I will quote the Amazon blurb:

What is the least we need to achieve the most? With this question in mind, MIT graduate Eric Brende flipped the switch on technology. He and his wife, Mary, ditched their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water, and everything else motorized or "hooked to the grid," and spent eighteen months living in a remote community so primitive in its technology that even the Amish consider it antiquated.

Better Off is the story of their real-life experiment to see whether our cell phones, wide-screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier – or whether life would be preferable without them. This smart, funny, and enlightening book mingles scientific analysis with the human story to demonstrate how a world free of technological excess can shrink stress – and waistlines – and expand happiness, health, and leisure.

This – book – is – incredible. I have read it and re-read and re-read it yet again, numerous times. If you're curious what living with an Amish-like group is like, this is the book to find out.

* * * * *

For our non-book product, I'd like to recommend something I've mentioned before: A manual hydraulic log splitter.

While we're extremely satisfied with our gas-powered log splitter, a concern we've always had at the back of our mind is how we would split wood if gas wasn't available. There seemed to be no other option except the trusty maul and wedge, a prospect that holds less and less appeal as we get older. (For those who think splitting firewood is easy, keep in mind hardwoods such as oak or maple split very easily; softwood conifers, which dominate Idaho, do not.)

So when we found this manual hydraulic log splitter, we knew we'd found the missing link between splitting by hand and splitting with a gas engine, and immediately ordered one. It has performed exceptionally well.

A manual hydraulic splitter is just a bottle jack in a horizontal position, with two levers for applying the hydraulics. Its only limitation is with very large rounds, which are beyond its capacity. Of course it's not as fast as a gas-powered splitter, but it has the compensating virtues of being much, much quieter. 

The splitter weighs about 80 lbs. and is easily transported on a hand truck.

The gas-powered log splitter is still a better choice for large quantities of wood and/or huge rounds; but having a manual hydraulic splitter is a superb backup, especially for those of us who depend on wood heat.

(Obligatory disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, if you purchase through those links, we earn a small commission.)

The missing link

If there's one rule of thumb we have on our homestead, it's to acquire, whenever possible, manual versions of tools that require fuel or electricity to operate – if for no other reason than to have a backup in case of power outages or fuel shortages.

This is our log splitter. We purchased it back in 2003.

When we first moved to Idaho, we already had several years of experience using a woodstove and were confident about what it took to gather our wood supply. Granted Idaho has much colder winters than the ones we got in southwestern Oregon, but after all a maul is a maul and we were both pretty good at hand-splitting oak, maple, or madrone.

But this part of Idaho doesn't have hardwoods. We're surrounded by conifers. And soft woods, we learned, behave much much differently than do hard woods when it comes to applying a maul.

The first few attempts to split some red fir were actually pretty funny. Remember those old Looney Tunes cartoons with Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner? Poor Wile E. – every time he tried to set a trap for the Roadrunner, it backfired. In one such cartoon he tried to chop something with an axe, and the axe bounced back and sent Wiley vibrating all over the landscape.

Well that's what happened to us. Every time we tried to whack a piece of fir with a maul, the vibration from the blow reverberated up and sent us shaking like Wile E. The soft fir or tamarack absorbed the blow of the maul so much more than oak that it took many many more blows to split a piece of wood. Don and I looked at each other and knew we would never be able to split the many cords of wood we would need to keep warm over the winter.

So... enter the log splitter. It's been a superb machine, effortlessly splitting endless cords of firewood over the years to keep us warm.

But in the back of our minds was the constant concern about being dependent on a gas-powered machine. However we were unable to find any alternative for ease of splitting wood – especially as we get older – beyond our trusty collection of mauls.

Until recently.

Here in our new home, the log splitter is in back, toward the barn. We just had a load of firewood delivered, in front of the house.

Normally this wouldn't be an issue, especially since the wood is already split. However two problems have arisen: One, the split wood was split too large, so many of the pieces are so big they won't even fit in the woodstove. This means we have to re-split much of the delivery.

And two, the log splitter has a flat tire. This means we can't move it from the barn to the front of the house until it gets repaired.

So, faced with these issues, we fell back upon something we purchased last year and haven't had much opportunity to use yet: our manual hydraulic log splitter.

A manual hydraulic splitter is – literally – just a bottle jack in a horizontal position, with two levers for applying the hydraulics.

This is what I mean about massive pieces of wood. Pieces this size won't "catch" in a woodstove unless it's already roaring hot, if they even fit in the door of the stove at all. They need to be split in half.

So I loaded the manual splitter onto a hand truck (it weighs about 80 lbs.) and trundled it from the barn to the front of the house where the woodpile is.

A manual hydraulic splitter works much the same as a gas-powered splitter. The wood is placed in a cradle..

...then the handles are pumped to advance the ram and drive the wood into the wedge, splitting it. This is the ram.

The ram is released with a valve, which is then tightened when it's time to advance the ram again.

When resetting the ram, I've found it's helpful to place a small stick on the ground to let me know how far back to release it. This saves the ram going too far back or too far forward.

The levers are removable. The left lever advances the ram a bit faster, the right lever a bit slower. Like gears on a bicycle, the right lever is better for very stubborn pieces of wood. Most of the time we pump both levers at the same time (like the handles of a ski machine in a gym), which is easier.

For all but the knottiest pieces, the wood will split after three or four pumps, though sometimes it's best to continue advancing the ram farther so split the piece more completely.

It's not an overly fast technique for wood splitting, but it's effective. This much wood (which should last us about a week) took me an hour to split. Later I split some dryer wood, and it split more easily, taking me about 45 minutes for the same quantity.

Of course, this splitter has its limits. We have some exceptionally large rounds (18 to 24 inches across).

I tried splitting one of these using the manual splitter. No dice. This was as far as I got:

As Don put it, rounds this large will require a "sledge and wedge."

The particular model of splitter we have is called a SunJoe, and it cost about $250. However there are many varieties on the market.

Altogether I couldn't be more pleased with this unit. In fact, the more I use it, the more I like it. It's truly the missing link between splitting by hand and using a gas-powered log splitter we were looking for.

As we get older, we're always on the looking for ways to "work smarter, not harder," and this unit allows us to do that without depending on a gas-powered splitter in case gas becomes unavailable.

The gas-powered log splitter is still a better choice for large quantities of wood and/or huge rounds; but having a manual hydraulic splitter is a superb backup, especially for those of us who depend on wood heat.