Cost for 200 pounds of firewood - Ask travis

Pete Simmons

Member
Messages
546
Location
Melbourne, FL
Maybe Travis can help with this question.

I am doing a little science project comparing costs of various fuels.

How much would 200 lbs of firewood cost?

or put another way - How much does a cord weigh and what does a cord cost?

My guess is that about a dozen logs 8" dia and 12" long would weigh about 200 lbs.

Any agreement or thoughts.
 
My thought is that this would be a very impractical way to measure wood. Different species of wood vary greatly in density. And fresh cut or seasoned makes a huge difference in weight.
 
Pete, I just weighed one piece of green cord wood. It weighs 15 pounds. The size of the piece of wood is 1/4 of a cubic foot. There is a 128 cubic feet in a cord.So that would mean that there is 512 pieces of wood in my cord.each weighing 15 pounds. So the cord of wood sitting in my front yard comes in around 7680 pounds.
Keep in mind that this cord is ash, green and it has been raining on it all day.:thumb:
you also have to think about the fact that a cord is 4 foot by 4 foot by 8 feet. That is stacked. air between the pieces counts in the cord but add no weight. So you could probably knock a couple a thousand pounds off that. And come up with around 5 thousand pounds,
 
Frank's right - various species, seasoning and cutting methods can dramatically impact the potential energy gotten from "firewood".

It might take one of those "All things being equal, the best-case scenario of wood..." and find out which species burns the best then extrapolate costs from there.
 
My thought is that this would be a very impractical way to measure wood. Different species of wood vary greatly in density. And fresh cut or seasoned makes a huge difference in weight.
What would you know about being impractical. While you where typing I was weighing wood:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
 
Oh forgot the cord in the driveway cost $175.00. But he just went up $20.00 bucks today. So that would make it around .039 cents a pound or right about $7 dollars for your 200 pounds.
 
Last edited:
not sure on the weight factor

but i can tell ya that a good load in a 8 ft pickup box at its best is just a half of chord and closer to a third of a chord..as for cost factor around us it runs approx 125 chord and the heat index on good wood beit oak or ash or hickory or cherry for instance is that those woods will heat my house for aprrox 600 dollars and 600 dollars of propane or fuel oil at last years prices wont.
 
Thanks for all the info.

Yes I know there are lots of variables.

Kinda like asking how much does a fat lady weigh...or how big is a small pizza.....Depends on many factors.

I like the about $7 for about 200 pounds of wood.

By The Way - The 200 pounds of wood is about 1,000,000 BTU or about 1 day heating a mid size house in our northern states. Now I know I just introduced another million variables into this but dontcha think if you were sitting in a average house with outside temps about 30 degrees with a nice wood stove - That burning 200 pounds of wood in 24 hours would keep it comfortable inside?
 
Also -

All that moisture in your firewood you know what happens to it??

Well you use some of the BTU's you had in the wood to turn that moisture into steam and send it up the stack.

I know different woods have different heat values but I bet moisture content is one of the bigger variables.
 
mr NYE the science guy

your 200 pds of good wood would do fine if the house was up to temp already.. we go threw approximatly 10 to 12 pieces of good wood in the average size of 18 inchs long and approx 6" to 8" diameter in cold weather.
 
You guys are actually a long ways off because you are not figuring in air holes in the piled wood. A cord of green hardwood goes tips the scales at 5100 pounds per cord. The reason I know this, is that loggers are paid by the weight and not by the cord.

Its a practicality issue. To have a scaler stick scale pulp wood would take time and slow down the stream of trucks coming into the papermill. A long time ago they took some average weights of cords of various woods, created a sheet and pay you by that. Now the trucks roll into the mill, get weighed on the way in, unload their wood, and then get reweighed on their weigh out. The difference between the weighs is the weight of the load, or tare weight.

Just as an example, our tri-axle truck weighs 26,500 pounds loaded, and we are typically haul in the 87,000 pound range. If you do the math that comes out to 60,000 pounds of wood per load roughly, and at 5100 pounds per cord, that is about 11.8 cords of hardwood. The trip from scale house, to the crane, and then back to the scale house, takes about 10 minutes.

I don't know off the top of my head what all the various wood types are per cord, but Spruce and Fir Pulp I know is 4100 pounds per cord 2 130 dollars a cord, and Hemlock is 4500 pounds per cord at 95 dollars a cord.

Now knowing this, a good logger can use this to his advantage. The first thing is, cut a load of wood and haul it right into the mill. Waiting means the water inside the wood will begin to dry out, and you'll lose money. Its the same thing for cutting your trees low to the ground. The bigger wood is closer to the ground, so if you can get an extra foot at the stump, that equates weight wise to about 8 feet at the top of the tree. Since there is no limbs at the base of a tree, it means a lot less work, for the same amount of money, to cut your trees low to the ground.
 
Last edited:
Part B:

Now if you are thinking this system could be manipulated with ease, you kind of are right. Because the paper companies unload these trucks in one big lift, what is inside that pile of wood is kind of unknown. Where we deliver our wood, the guy running the crane says whats in those loads are up to the scaler to tell, not him so he won't "tattle" on you and tell the scale house whats in the wood.

In other words, you can have a load of spruce and fir, and yet half of it be hemlock since that weighs up more. That will give you a better scale weight wise, so you will be getting paid more money for spruce and fir, yet have the weight per cord of hemlock. That works out quite nicely.Other times you can get rid of junk wood that is hard to sell, by burying that in a load of wood.

But of course if you do get caught, and we have many times, you end up getting kicked out of the papermill for a few months, so ultimately its not worth playing the games. Generally speaking loggers and truckers play by the rules because its just easier and faster to keep things separated out.

It should also be said that I am quite comfortable selling wood by weight. When the system first came out, people cried foul, but generally speaking I think the weight thing is a fair system. The typical cord of hardwood does weigh around 5100 pounds, and Fir and spruce does weigh around 4100 pounds, and so forth.
 
Last edited:
Okay, now to answer your other question about heat and BTU's. Unfortunately you are way off on this one too. Wood heat has a lot of btus, but calculating heat output is kind of hard. A lot of heat goes up the chimney in order to get the thing to draft. At the same time a lot of heat is used up in steam in the drying process right before it burns, and of course not all of it burns.

A hard and fast rule where I live is that a cord of wood is roughly equivalent to 100 gallons of oil. If someone puts in a new woodstove and wants to know how many cord they need to heat their house, just figure out the gallons and subtract from that. If the guy uses 800 gallons of oil, then he would need 8 cords of firewood.

This winter the price of wood hit 250 dollars a cord. With oil at 3.20 cents a gallon (at the time), wood heat was almost as expensive as oil heat. Add in the cost of added house insurance, the nuisance factor (loading a woodstove several times a day), and the need for firewood storage, and oil looks pretty good money wise. Its one thing to have a lot of btus, but if you cannot meter them out in a controlled way, it does little good.

Firewood is also hard to calculate because you have other factors. The rate of burn is harder to control. Sometimes I had to open the windows in my house when I burned wood because the heat was so high. Those are really wasted btus because its more than the house can stand. At night though, sometimes the propane furnace would kick on because the fire died down too much.

I have done the calculations many times on my house, and even though I have "free" wood, it just does not make sense for me to burn wood at this time. I currently use propane, which is vastly more efficient then oil per btu for several reasons, but that is a whole other thread onto its own.:)

PS: Don't get me started on outside woodstoves, to say I am not a fan is an understatement.
 
Last edited:
I've got alittle time here, so I will explain the logging system a bit. Most people think that since I have 400 acres I simply cut the wood and have it hauled to the papermill or sawmill. Actually there is a very specific chain that must be followed.

First the papermills decided how much wood they need in a given year. At 2500 cord of wood consumed per day, that is A LOT of wood. So they go to wood brokers and contract with them so they are guaranteed a supply of wood.

These suppliers contract with truckers and other companies to deliver this wood to the papermills under their name. Right now the papermills are screaming for wood. Their supplies are low because of the heavy snows we have had this winter, has killed the logging industry. So has the price of diesel fuel. So right now there is not "quota". If you have a load of wood, you can haul it in and credit it to the wood brokers.

Now if we were under a quota system, that would be where the paper companies do not need wood, but they are obligated by contract to still buy x amounts of cords from the brokers. In this case each trucker is given a "ticket" which states which mill the load of wood can go to, on which week, and what kind of wood it can be. If you are in a stand of hemlock, and they only have tickets for spruce, you are out of luck there logger.

Now money wise here is how it works. The landowner gets 1/3 of the money, the logger gets the other 1/3, and the trucker gets 1/3. A few bucks per cord are given to the broker. Now of all the people that get their hands on this money (say 135 dollars a cord for spruce and fir pulp), the trucker makes out the best. He has the least time in it, and the least physical work. The logger does a little better in that he uses some diesel fuel, and has a lot of work in it. The landowner makes out the least. They get 1/3, yet have had to pay taxes on it for 30-40 years or more, or had to pay for the land in the beginning.

On sawlogs,the landowner does slightly better in that the landowner gets half, and the logger and trucker split the other half. Still considering the amount of time it takes to grow saw logs, again the landowner is not really making out that well.

(Lots more on this subject, but I got to head to work).
 
Thanks

Travis -

Thanks for the info.

Very interesting and please add more.

I really find the fact that you with 400 acres of wood and a great desire to hear that chain saw hum would use propane to heat your house very interesting.
 
I think you are off just a little on your wood to oil conversion Travis. I can tell you for sure that last winter i used 600 gallons of propane in my shop. This year I kept it heated to the same temp with 2 cords of wood. That would equate to 300 gallons of propane to one cord of wood.
And you are going to have to start the new thread to enplane how propane is more efficient than oil.:thumb::dunno:
 
Top