(rechargeable) Battery chemistry best suited for storage abuse

Green burns fine if you put it over the flames first, they boil any water out

NT

It may have a net negative heat content, however. ...or were you talking about greenIES? Let 'em all burn.

What you get is a little steam vapour plus a nice hot radiant fire. Hardly net negative.

NT

No, what you get is a *lot* of steam vapor and, yes, it can be a net negative. It does take energy to convert water to steam, you know.

Please forgive me if I don't believe you. Whenever I did that indoors, I ended up with a thin layer of sticky creosote on the ceiling and a noxious smell throughout the house. You're not only evaporating the water. You're also evaporating the sap and the oils. One might be able to do that once in a while, or maybe in a fireplace with an overhanging grate, but not on top of an airtight wood burner.

One year, I was stuck with a load of green firewood when my firewood dealer sold the wood he was saving for me to someone that offered a better price. In order to get any kind of heat, I had to dry the wood quickly over the wood burner. I did my best to limit the damage with an improvised hood, but it still stunk and made a mess. I finally ended up building a rather marginal cinder block outdoor kiln, built a fire under it, and dried my firewood inside, roughly 3 days burn at a time. The hard part was making sure I didn't start a forest fire. Even so, the best I could do was dry the outer 1/2 inch of sapwood. I sawed a few logs and used a moisure meter (essentially an ohms-guesser) to test for drying depth. That winter was awful and the beginning of when I started buying two years of firewood at a time:

I guess nobody in electronics has read their steam tables since college. Oh well.

At 212F and 14.7 PSIA, liquid water has a specific volume of 0.016716 cubic-ft/pound_mass and steam has a specific volume of 26.80 cubic-ft/pound_mass. That's a volumetric ratio of about 1600:1 for water->steam expansion. That's a HUGE amount of steam for even a stove full of logs that are "only" about 1/3 water.

Although it varies radically by the type of wood, season, environment, etc, fresh cut green wood is about 50-70% water by weight. Dry (seasoned) firewood is about 30% water by weight. If you've ever dragged green firewood up a hill or my stairs, you know what I mean by heavy weight. That means any clever tricks for fast drying firewood will need to evaporate about 1/3 the weight of the log in order to make it easily burnable. Good luck.

Well, I've burnt green wood outdoors many times. Its not as good as dry but it does burn, and the fire does give off heat. When I've had a mix the green always goes where it can dry some first. I gather water content varies a good bit by species.

NT