Why Kiln Dried Firewood from Tees Valley Firewood?
The main reason to choose Kiln Dried firewood is the low moisture content, it should be below 20% but really any properly dried wood should be averaging much lower at around 15%. Readings are taken from the inside face of a freshly split piece of wood across the grain at ambient temperature.
The reason moisture content is so important when burning wood is that having excess water in the wood causes the wood to burn inefficiently, as the energy is used in evaporating water rather creating heat. Inefficient burns also cause tar and creosote to be released and stick to the inside of your chimney or flue and pollution of the outside environment through excess particulate matter which would've been burnt off if the fire was burning at optimum temperature. So apart from being a waste of money, poorly dried logs really aren't good for the environment either. A moisture content of below 15% is what general consensus throughout the industry tells us is the ideal moisture content for heat output and cleanliness of burn.
Heating the wood using hot air of temperatures up to 75˚C increases the speed at which water can be removed from the wood by increasing the water carrying capacity of the air moving over it, circulating the air hundreds of times an hours before exhausting the fully saturated air out of the kiln and replacing it with cooler but drier air to repeat the process. This allows the drying process to be completed in a matter of days rather than taking at least a year for most species of hardwood to take them from felled moisture content to sub 20%. In our experience the process works far better when the firewood is partly naturally seasoned first but with the correct kiln design it can be done with careful control of the exhausted wet air and inlet 'new' air.
Drying using our wood chip fired boiler or the otherwise entirely waste heat from a neighbouring on farm Anaerobic Digester plant is a highly efficient use of energy. We use a tiny percentage of the wood chip in comparison to the amount of firewood we dry and our thickly insulated kiln loses no heat other than that out of the exhausted air.
Secondly, firewood that has been kiln dried should be entirely free of any wood-born insects such as woodworm or bark beetles as the high heat in the kiln kills them. This means no creepy crawlies joining you in your living room to enjoy the heat on a cold winters night!
After we've dried our logs we run them through our Trommel cleaner to shake off any loose bark, sawdust or bark that has already fallen off during the drying process. This ensures there is nothing in your bag of logs but logs. No mess, no waste, just logs.
The 'cleanings' separated by this process are then chipped back into our chip store to provide power for the boiler. Nothing goes to waste if we can help it.