Boiling it down

September 8, 2009

Do you wonder why maple syrup is so expensive? Well the reason that it’s so expensive is because a great deal of energy goes into making it. Below is a video that shows exactly how much wood it takes when you fire boiler. We fire one side of the boiler at the time this way there’s minimal heat loss.

we put about that much wood in the archway every 15-20 minutes, that means that we are firing the boiler every 7-10 minutes. This is of course depending on the different types of what and how dry it is. This year was a bit of a disaster as we ran out of wood and had to spend some of the time burning some not so dry popular.

Mike stumbled across a great website called http://www.woodheat.org This website is full of information in regards to firewood.  My favorite part of the website is the energy per air dried cord or in thousands of BTUs. This gives a list of the most efficient types of firewood to use.

I thought that the best wood to use was iron wood, I might have the wrong name for it though. As I can’t find it anywhere in Ontariotrees.com.  it’s very dense wood that doesn’t grow very large, it has kind of a flaky bark as he gets older.  Maybe somebody can help me.  The bark looks a bit like Black Ash when it’s older, but I don’t think that’s right.

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Filed under: Videos, industry
Comments
4 Comments »

  • Dave I have a feeling that ironwood is the top of the list on the chart from woodheat website it is listed as rock elm.
    I did some looking into it and I’m pretty sure that Rock elm is what its called in the states and ironwood in canada. I am just guessing cause the sites I was on didn’t give me any alternate names.
    Mike.G on September 9, 2009

  • Ironwood is a common name that can refer to either blue beech (Carpinus caroliniana)or hop hornbeam (Ostrya virginiana), and you described the latter of the two. Here is a link to a list of quite a number of trees and their btu content:

    http://chimneysweeponline.com/howood.pdf
    Sean Flanagan on October 27, 2009

  • Thanks Sean, This is an amazing document and a really great website you found it on.

    Looks like there is a ton of amazing information of that website.

    http://www.chimneysweeponline.com/

    http://www.chimneysweeponline.com/howood.htm

    Thanks for solving the mystery.
    Dave on October 27, 2009

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