SEASONED
Seasoned Firewood Available in Maine
Seasoned Firewood
Firewood is an essential commodity that has been in use for millennia. To this day, it helps communities living in harsh cold environments and those without access to alternative fuels. However, there’s more to firewood than just cutting down a tree and burning it for fuel. Before it can be used, firewood needs some treatment before it can burn efficiently. The end product is seasoned firewood. Let’s explore what it is.
Why Can’t You Burn Freshly Cut Logs?
Trees are living organisms. The wood in them is essentially a highway for transporting water and nutrition from their roots to their leaves and flowers. When wood is cut into logs, this water still remains inside the transportation tubes. As a result, it prevents it from burning efficiently and produces more smoke. Therefore a drying process is required before any wood can be used as firewood.
What is Seasoned Firewood?
Seasoning is the process of drying before it can be used as fuel for burning. In order to dry firewood, it needs to be left in a well-ventilated area for the moisture to evaporate away. As opposed to kiln-dried firewood, no heating method is used to dry seasoned firewood; therefore, the process is quite long, requiring 6 months to a year to reach the desired moisture content.
What Should be the Ideal Moisture Content, and How Can You Measure It?
Moisture has mass, so the simplest way to measure moisture content is by measuring the mass of the wood over time. The percentage of total mass it loses over time is the % of moisture it loses. Ideally, you want the wood to have a moisture content of less than 20% of its mass for it to be an efficient fuel for burning. However, you need to also know how much moisture it has to begin with. This number varies depending on the grain, temperature, and relative humidity. In order to figure this out, you need to sacrifice some test pieces from a log of wood. Cut different lengths from areas along the log. Measure its weight over time and stop once it no longer changes. Record all the readings and average them out to figure out the moisture content.
Where Can You Sell Seasoned Firewood?
There is a huge market of seasoned firewood in Maine, both retail and wholesale. The retail market is everyday consumers who require varying lengths of firewood for indoor and outdoor heating, as well as cooking. The wholesale market includes resellers, distributors, and processing mills that buy large logs in bulk and resell them to their market network.
If you’re looking into starting a seasoned firewood business, it may suit you to sell it at a lower price in bulk during the beginning of your venture. Leaving your logs out to dry over the summer and selling them in the winter would be the ideal way to gain investment for setting up your own processing mill. Once, established you too can gain the advantage of the retail market as it enables you to gain a higher markup on your finished goods.
Retail Firewood Selling
When the weather becomes cold, many people start looking for firewood as a source of heating fuel. Burning wood as fuel is one of the oldest ways to produce heat and survive extremely cold temperatures. It is still being used in communities today that don’t have access to other cheap sources. If you live in such an area and happen to have an overabundance of logs, it may present an excellent business opportunity. However, selling firewood is not as straightforward. To sell firewood as a retail product, you need to take sizing considerations and its quantity before selling.
Selling by the Cord
To understand selling firewood at retail, you need to understand your consumer first. Consumer requirements for firewood are primarily for indoor heating using fireplaces and in fire pits when spending time outdoors. As a result, you need to cut firewood to a certain length. Additionally, they need a stockpile for future use. As a market standard, firewood is sold by the cord – a measure of firewood volume coming out to 128 cubic feet. There is no specified length you can cut to; as long as it fulfills consumer requirements, you’ll be fine.
Know Your Customer
You’re selling firewood at retail to the general public; hence you need to give them options. Selling by the cord but giving them product options is an excellent way to add value to it. For example, you can bundle different lengths of firewood so that you can cater to a diverse market. This will increase your sales volume and make sure your business remains profitable.
Wholesale Firewood Selling
Firewood is one of the most essential fuels for winter in cold climates, especially in areas where no other fuel source may be present. These regions are normally marked by rough terrain but have an abundance of trees to support the need. If you live in such an area and own forested land, then you may benefit from a business whose objective is selling firewood. Though selling retail firewood is a much more lucrative business, selling firewood at wholesale may be more feasible at the start of your business.
Selling by the Truck
Selling firewood at wholesale entails that you want to sell large quantities of it to bulk buyers. These buyers are normally firewood processing mills that season and cut it into a retail product. It can then be resold at a margin in the consumer market. In order for these mills to make a profit, they need to buy bulk firewood at a fraction of the unit price of a cord – the volumetric measurement of wood for sale.
When selling wholesale to these suppliers, you’ll need to determine the volume of wood logs that you have. Other than that, you need to consider your transportation cost as you’ll be selling long logs that can fit inside your truck. The costs for cutting and transportation should be kept in mind when selling firewood at wholesale; otherwise, they may end up cutting into your profits. When transporting firewood logs, owing to their moisture content, make sure to keep weight considerations in mind as wood logs are quite heavy when freshly cut.
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