what firewood kinds be side pine i should not burn in camp fires wood stove and fireplace

[OM617YOTA]

I understand the reluctance to burn pine.

When I first bought this place, I had three big cottonwoods taken down. In a list of 40+ species of firewood, ranked by BTU content, cottonwood came in dead last. It was here on the property already, you can't give the stuff away, so if I wanted it gone I'd have had to pay to dispose of it, so I burned it. Weighed like concrete when wet, just super saturated with water. Won't dry out while sitting on the ground at all. Splitting was a pain, I drove more than one wedge out of sight, without splitting the wood at all, just squeezing out water like from a sponge. A borrowed 37 ton splitter took care of that. Once dry, it weighed like balsa wood, took a flame very easily, burned very quickly, and made a lot of ash. Smell when burning wasn't bad, different in the same kind of way that pine smoke smells different than hardwood smoke, but not bad. Smell when green and split was kinda funky.

It heated the house just fine.

Even knowing cottonwood will heat the house just fine, I wouldn't buy or haul it, unless that was all that was available. There's just plain better available, even if pine.

If I had ready access to hardwoods, I'd burn that instead. Nothing wrong with pine, just that there'd be better available.

I do have an insulated flue pipe. Start a fire, run it wide open until the temp gauge says out of the creosote zone, then choke it down for a longer burn. Don't start a fire and let it smoke and smolder all day. I brush my chimney every year, never more than soot powder to remove.

 

[LuDookie]

Pine (pinus) is a genus, not a species. Some of these generalizations are ridiculous. I have burned plenty of ponderosa and lodgepole, but I wouldn't burn southern yellow in a fireplace.

Ponderosa, Lodgepole, and various Spruce is what I typically burned.

 

[LuDookie]

A few misnomers aside I think you will see that the division here sharply follows geography. I grew up in your part of the country and burned nothing but pine. Nothing wrong with it. It'll keep the pipes from freezing, to be sure. Living in Ohio the options couldn't be more different. Few pine, nearly countless types of hardwoods, most of which have anywhere from 20-40% higher btu than pine. Then there is the burn times, pine goes fast compared to hardwoods. It's not that I won't burn pine, it's just that it's not worth it when there are better options so readily available. And that's likely where much of the "ignorance" comes in to play. For people that have been surrounded by nothing but hardwoods their whole life, about all they know is that pine isn't worth the effort compared to what they have around them.

I think this is very accurate.

 

[sean donato]

A few misnomers aside I think you will see that the division here sharply follows geography. I grew up in your part of the country and burned nothing but pine. Nothing wrong with it. It'll keep the pipes from freezing, to be sure. Living in Ohio the options couldn't be more different. Few pine, nearly countless types of hardwoods, most of which have anywhere from 20-40% higher btu than pine. Then there is the burn times, pine goes fast compared to hardwoods. It's not that I won't burn pine, it's just that it's not worth it when there are better options so readily available. And that's likely where much of the "ignorance" comes in to play. For people that have been surrounded by nothing but hardwoods their whole life, about all they know is that pine isn't worth the effort compared to what they have around them.

It's not hard to fall Into that mentality. I 100% had it, till i met my wife. Her family (until recently) had a ranch out in Montana. They heated with lodge pole pine year round in a green wood hydronic boiler. Never caused any issues. Her grandfather and I talked about it quite a bit my first trip out. He was from PA originally and transplanted to Montana. After several trips, and helping fell, skid,buck, split, and stack countless cords of wood, I began to notice it was really clean burning. Just burned pretty quick vs our Eastern hardwoods. That boiler burned 24/7 for heat in the house and main shop, plus providing the domestic hot water. I'd like to think if there was any issues burning it they would have noticed. Can't remember a time when they cleaned the chimney, and asking my wife's grandfather about chimney maintenance always yielded a laugh and no we don't need to do much to It. He would shut it down once a year for inspection and brushing it out/any repairs it may have needed. Really opened my eyes up to being narrow minded. He probably had about 5 years of wood split and stacked at any given time. The wood shed was darn near as big as the shop. the room the boiler was in held a week's worth of wood in case they got a big snow.

 

[lohan808]

I live in Georgia and we have more loblolly pine than you could imagine. There are other types as well. We heated the family home for decades with that stuff. Mix in some hard wood to get the flue good and hot and toss in the big chunks of pine. It dries pretty quick. If you follow the simple rules of hot box hot pipe you won't have any problems.

 

[Breckinridge Elkins]

I think this East vs West debate comes down to altitude. Pines dominate above a certain altitude. The highest peak east of the Mississippi is 6700ft. That's about where we start cutting wood in the Sierras. The best wood in the mountain states is lodge pole pine, and that starts around 6k ft. We aren't even allowed to cut hardwoods where I collect wood.
Now when I lived in coastal NorCal, doug fir was basically free. We burned redwood for kindling and prized hardwoods like madrone or eucalyptus if you had a splitter. Plenty of tan oak in the woods but a pain to split. Pine meant bull pine which is a tough wood to split.
As for creosote, I was told if you just stuffed a bunch of newspaper by itself in the firebox and burned it periodically it would clean out the pipe.

Check out the attached picture. We tend to forget exactly how different east and west are in terms of altitude. This is why the east has hardwoods and the west has pines.