Using pallets as firewood

[gdavis24]

Every time I haul home and cut up a dozen of them for kindling, I'm reminded of their real value: Pallets are the lowest form of firewood.

 

[lps8]

the right type of pallet is great

Have used pallets that come into our business that are 3x3 oak and up to 9' long. Is mostly bolted together. No nails, burns clean, hot and long. Cut to 16" long blocks. Fill up fireplace insert at night, set to slow burn and have hot coals in the morning with a warm house all night. A lot less ash than burning split logs, because it was a consistent shape, easier to load.

Am building new house with Opel II and am planning on using pallets. I liked them better than split logs and are a lot less work. I have to burn them anyway to get rid of them and I don't think they can be beat. Give me a choice between free logs or these 3x3 pallets, I'll take the pallets.

lps

 

[howellhandmade]

I hadn't thought of the possibility of pallets being contaminated, but I guess I've never gotten them from anywhere that uses nasty chemicals. It's true, cutting them up for firewood is work, but if you don't have any money there's at least a chance you've got some time. As for the nails, I bought a 3-pack of cheap carbide-toothed blades a while back because I was sawing up some sections of bowling alley to make workbenches. There were lots of nails that just had to be sawn through, and I figured I'd waste all the blades. I'm still on the first one after the bowling alley and a bunch of pallets.

 

[SS396driver]

when I cut them I use a demo blade they are made to hit nails. Don't use them that much for heat but I do cut them to fit the area where I stack the firewood

 

[carlseawolf]

Pallets / scrap timber make up about a third of my firewood pile each year as it allows me to save the good stuff for when i go out , or it's really cold.

I get all of them for free and chop them with a chainsaw between the blocks so no nails are hit.

This type of wood is best used when sitting in the house watching the telly so you can keep stocking up the fire when needed.

 

[JeffHK454]

Pallets make great fuel ..just depends on which pallets you get.

In my scrounging for kindling planks I lucked onto 6+ cords of Oak 4"x6"x36" timbers..

I've posted this pic before..this is maybe 1/10th of what I had..

 

[palmrose2]

I don't understand. I have been cutting up pallets with 1 (one) circular saw blade for 2 straight seasons now. I probably have close to 200 (no joke) pallets cut. No problems with nails.

Here is how I cut:

Lay the pallet flat on the ground. Most pallets are 7 1x4 on the bottom, 3 2x4 stringers and 11 1x4 on top. I start with the top. I run the saw parallel to the stringers about 2" in from each. This makes me 22 1x4s. Flip the pallet over and repeat. This creates another 14 1x4s. Now I cut the stringers into 3 pieces between where the 1x4s were since there are no nails there. This creates 3 2x4s.

So...each pallet nets me ~36 1x4s and 9 2x4s. All ~16" long.

Really very little risk to the blade if you use some common sense.

ac

There you go. I haven't burned pallets in a long time but this is exactly how I did it. Good circular saw and a carbide blade that I never changed. It couldn't have taken me more than about 90 seconds a pallet once I got in a rhythm. Zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip,zip, zip, done. Next? Mine were all oak and DRY.

 

[tomsteve]

i worked in a pallet shop/mill quite some time ago. mainly hardwood. at the time, i would see this maple goin thru that had this wild wavy look in it and though we were makin pallets with junk lumber. now i guessin we made some pallets with some pretty nice curly maple. i've picked up pallets and cut em up for firewood and also found some good useable lumber in em. nails in oak stain and add character( also a lot of quartersawn oak found in pallets i've piked up).

 

[haveawoody]

JeffHK454,

Looks identical to the runners from stone yard skids That I'm more than happy to tear up for firewood.
Nice haul on them, i bet you have no trouble in controling the burn on them

 

[JeffHK454]

JeffHK454,

Looks identical to the runners from stone yard skids That I'm more than happy to tear up for firewood.
Nice haul on them, i bet you have no trouble in controling the burn on them

They had three 3"x8"72" Red oak planks standing on edge nailed to three of the timbers above to make one stout skid! The bad part was that they stacked the planks outside on racks after they disassembled them , needless to say they where rotten beyond use.

A couple years back I burned the decking off these skids, which where White Oak 2"x10"x36" boards, luckily they put these inside with the runners.

I'd say I've heated my house for three years with this "garbage".

 

[Saddle Mander]

Our church is renovating the youth building. I am driving around collecting clean, heat-treated pallets for the project. The slats will be cut off and nailed to sections of the wall to give the building a rugged feel.

The stringers will go to my wood pile. I'm getting a stove installed in a few weeks and have almost 3 cords of unseasoned wood stacked in back. (A half cord MIGHT be ready by November, but I'm not banking on it.)

With care and luck, the pallets should help get me through this first winter, but I'm still trying to round up more ash or truly seasoned wood.

 

[Marine5068]

We have hundreds of White Oak pallets a week go out of work.
Beautiful wood and seems like such a waste to trash them.
I wish there was an easier way to cut them and no nails to deal with.

 

[steved]

Some specialy pallets with hardwood 4X4s as skids........ maybe. Otherwise, pallets aren't for me.

Same here, I worked at a steel rolling mill back when I was fresh out of college; they got 50% of their coils in on hardwood pallets that consisted of two rough sawn 4x4s or 4x6s with two rough sawn 2x4s or 3x5s connecting them. They were free, I was paid to break them apart, and I drove a truck to work every day. In that case, it was worthwhile...I was bringing home a full pickup load a day.

The only downfall are the nails and staples...if you spread the ashes on the yard.

I wouldn't waste my time on a typical pine/poplar pallet.

 

[rarefish383]

I skipped over most of the reply's and I'm sure most of this was said. Most pallets are made of hardwood, Oak, Beech, some Maple. Most are very dry because they are several years old. I used to have a side business hustling pallets. I got $2 for rebuildable pallets and $3.50 for perfect, ready to put into inventory ones. The place I dealt with gave you a slip with the number of pallets and type the day you brought them in, and cash the next day, when you turned in your slip. I got $100 per month to go by several stores in strip malls, where they couldn't stack them outside, and couldn't put them in the dumpsters. I was taking a load every other day, 35 pallets stacked on my GMC Sonoma. The by product was all of the non rebuildable pallets, I was stuck with. Pallets are built on machines, so all of the nails are in the same place. At first I stripped them down with a circular saw, then I just used my little Echo 305. For the 2 years I did that my wife said that was some of the best firewood we ever had. The deck boards stacked like a solid mass, a lot of weight in a tight space. To get rid of the nails, we put the ashes in a tin ash bucket, and set it outside, till the next clean out. Then dumped them in the trash and sent them down the road with the trash man. No we didn't set the world on fire with hot ashes in the trash. Only clean out the stove every 3 weeks or so, ashes were very dead. As all good things come to an end, so did this little venture, the pallet company went out of business. Any of the other pallet companies would only give $1 no matter condition, and it wasn't worth the work involved, Joe.

 

[Vermonster]

The plastic pallets make a lot of smoke.

That right there almost made me choke on my coffee. :msp_biggrin: LOL!!

 

[steved]

I skipped over most of the reply's and I'm sure most of this was said. Most pallets are made of hardwood, Oak, Beech, some Maple.

Must be a regional thing...they are almost all pine or poplar around here.

 

[zogger]

We have hundreds of White Oak pallets a week go out of work.
Beautiful wood and seems like such a waste to trash them.
I wish there was an easier way to cut them and no nails to deal with.

chainsaw and screen the ashes. Any old big busted speaker has a dandy magnet to use, too.

Dang, I have to hustle to find enough good quality pallets to stack my firewood on. Around here, they get sold for around 3 bucks apiece. I have found a few off the wall places that I scrounge from, but I only got one this week.

 

[Woodchucker Ron]

Must be a regional thing...they are almost all pine or poplar around here.

Depends on whats being shipped on them. I work in a mill where all sorts of thing come in and go out on pallets. I keep some of the hard wood ones for stacking my wood on and when they start to go bad I use them for kindling in my garage, works great for getting a hot fire fast. The guy that delivers and picks them up has a machine that grinds them up for mulch so they might be getting harder for you to find but if you look hard enough i'm sure you can find some.

 

[rarefish383]

The pallet company I used to sell to only took hardwood pallets. They said the industry standard for the 40X48 grocery store pallets (the only ones they bought) was hard wood only. I work for UPS in Laurel MD. We are a big Hub and process over 500 tractor trailers a day. The pallet company that removes our pallets hauls a tractor trailer load per day, each load has about 500 pallets, all hardwood. The rest go in the dumpster. They also told me the average life of a pallet was seven years, that's why I said they are usually dry as a bone. Maybe because I was targeting 40X48 standard pallets, and the places I charged to pick up from, all used the standard 40X48, that's mostly what I got. I did run across odd ball sized pallets, and they were often real thick pine. But they were usually all busted up. Anyway, if you look, you should be able to find hardwood pallets pretty easy, Joe.

 

[husqvarna257]

I love pallets! They are great for starting or reviving a slow fire. I burn in an OWB so I don't have to break them up too small. Most are good oak, some are pine. I also collect furring strip from a local small equipment shop, burns better than gas. As far as nails I clean my ashes out once a month and run a magnet through the pile.