I apologize in advance if this message is off topic for the forum. I've come here before for advice about chain saws, and many of the forum users appear to use their saws for home firewood cutting. So I'm assuming that this is probably the best place to post about drying firewood.

I live in Connecticut, and local lore holds firmly to the notion that wood should be "seasoned" for at least one year before it can be burned efficiently in a wood stove. I thought this might be longer than necessary, and so did an experiment to determine how long it takes to dry wood at my house to 20-25 percent moisture content by weight--the percentage of moisture usually cited as best for firewood.

I heat with a Regency I3100, a good fireplace insert but one with a relatively shallow (17 inches deep) firebox. I like to be able to load the wood straight into the stove (as opposed to loading it cross-wise) because I can get more into the stove for overnight burning in the winter. So I typically cut my firewood to 13-14 inch lengths.

For the experiment, I cut down a small (5 inches in diameter at breast height) American beech tree, immediately limbed it and bucked the stem into 13-14 inch lengths, weighed each piece, numbered each piece with a permanent marker, and inserted the pieces (none of them split) at various places in my woodpile, such that I could remove them to check and record their weights as they dried. The tree was cut on June 20, 2008. My wood is stacked on wooden pallets in the backyard, and the top of the stack is covered with green plastic tarps, but is open on the sides. The back yard is shaded much of the time by trees, and typically gets about three to four hours of sun on a sunny day in midsummer, although the back of the stack is completely shaded and gets no direct sunlight. I left some pieces out of the stack entirely, placing them in a moderately sunny location, off the ground on a pallet.

I recently ended the experiment, checking on residual moisture by taking a sample of the wood pieces and drying them in a convection oven at 350F, weighing them at hourly intervals until their weight stabilized, which I assumed to mean that they were essentially dry. From that, I could determine the initial moisture content, and well as the moisture content from the weights I recorded as the wood pieces dried.

Here are the basic results. The moisture content of the wood was 46 percent by weight when it was initially cut. The average moisture content of the various pieces reached 25 percent on August 18. On November 2, the average moisture content was 21.5 percent. There was little variation among the pieces (less than 3 percent based on the sample pieces eventually dried in the oven). The pieces left out of the stack, uncovered, were the driest, while pieces at the back of the stack (no direct sunlight) tended to retain the most moisture, but again, the range of variation was surprisingly small.

A few notes. According to an acquaintance who worked in the local lumber industry, wood air-dried in this area can reach about 18 percent moisture content, at which point its moisture content reaches equilibrium with the ambient humidity. The weather during the drying period was a little wetter than average. Most of the drying occurred very soon after cutting: More than 40 percent of the moisture lost was gone in two weeks, and over 60 percent in four weeks. As noted above, the wood reached the maximum recommended moisture content for burning (25 percent by weight) in just over eight weeks.

I hope this is of some interest. If not, thanks for bearing with me.

Jeff