firewood

Hardwood

Hardwood is always revered as being the best firewood, and to most extents it is.

Softwood

These are quotes that are most commonly said about softwood.

· Softwood will spit and pop. ( some do,)

· Softwood will soot and tar up the chimney. (not true, wet wood does this)

· Softwood will burn very quickly. (some softwoods are very dense and will burn for a long time)

The truth is any wet wood will soot up the chimney, some hardwoods spit as well especially sweet chestnut, and if you use your stove correctly you can get a fantastic amount of heat out of well-seasoned softwood.

Softwoods when burning will give off a very good heat,

Leylandii, Larch, Cedar, Cypress and Maccrocarpa all burn as well as hardwoods, especially in the more modern stoves.

Softwood is now becoming more popular as a firewood as customers try it and like it and it is cheaper than the hardwood

But the calorific value of softwood is often overlooked and softwood has the misguided reputation of tarring up the chimney.

About 90% of all of our firewood sold is hardwood (2006)

To date 70% of wood now sold is hardwood

Our softwood is mainly all Larch, not resinous or sappy, very dry and giving off very good heat. Feedback so far is excellent.

Like many other firewood suppliers, we are now recognising the benefits of this quality wood.

Products

Firewood

Firewood is sorted into hardwood and softwood before splitting and kept separate, and then depending on how the wood has come in it is processed by various different machinery.

This enables us to cut the wood to any size to suit any customer’s requests.

Firewood is supplied as loose loads by the cubic meter (M³) or can be supplied in net sacks.

When the timber comes in to us it goes through a sorting process First, species is defined and separated (hard or softwood)

Then the appearance is sorted and graded (branchwood, rings or long trunks)

And then during the splitting process any badly rotten or contaminated wood is removed.

Any really nice lengths of timber brought in are put to one side for milling

We are able to cut any length of firewood from 15cm up to 1.20 meters, and we pride ourselves on our ability to be flexible to our customers needs.

Wood contains up to 50% moisture when first felled. Because of this we season (dry) the wood through natural drying, which creates efficient burning and high heat output. We try to reduce the moisture to below 30%.