Читать книгу Firewood: An Expert Introduction to Equipment, Trees, Harvesting and Understanding This Valuable Resource - Troy JD McClain - Страница 4

During my years in the military it was expressed to us at every training that all military training manuals were written on a sixth grade reading and comprehension level in order to ensure that every member of our ranks could understand and use the manuals. Whether or not this is now or was ever true, I have not taken the time to determine, but the theory is sound. So I am writing today with a similar concept in mind. I am writing this book for all interested parties, the language used is not the same language as you would find in a sixth grade text or an Army training manual, but the content is structured so that all readers can take something away with them. Whether you are a “green” novice or a seasoned pro, there is information in here that will be useful to you at any level, and to start it is important to understand the why before the how.

The purpose of having a little knowledge about trees and chainsaws and how to process your own firewood is simply to save money. In the end the old adage “a penny saved is a penny earned”, is as true now as ever. All of the consumers in our world see it everyday, insurance companies fight for our patronage with every commercial, spouting off to the viewers that they can each save you, the driver or homeowner, over x-number of dollars per year by switching your coverage. Dentist, vehicle windshield replacement companies, bathroom renovators, and so many others advertise that they can do their jobs with just one appointment in order to cut the number of visits and your total costs as a consumer. But the savings don't start there. In today's turbulent economic climate an unprecedented number of people are looking to become self sufficient. Throughout society you can find folks who make money saving products for their own consumption like laundry detergent and fabric softener and home canned foods from their gardens or a local farmers market. Men and women alike will often make clothes and blankets instead of buying expensive imports. In Any Town USA you can find homes with smoke houses for smoking meats and cheeses, many of whom are hunters or raise their own animals for slaughter. The examples can go on forever. Folks are continually finding methods of providing for themselves in order to get away from contributing their hard earned dollars to the corporate fat cats and their Asian production lines. The ingenuity of the penny pincher is more remarkable now than it has ever been. Everywhere you look you can find resources on anything from how to make diesel fuel from used cooking oil to how to build a more efficient home out of straw bales and harness wind and solar energy to power and heat it. People in the North America, and all over the globe, are progressively moving forward in a steady march toward independence from mega corporations around the world. Collectively we are beginning to take notice of the large sums of money our dependence on the products and services of others cost us individually every year. There is an impressive, ever growing amount of attention given to the science of alternative fuels from corn, soy, sugar, and other crops. So it did not surprise me when I was approached about writing a book that would assist the average Jane and Joe with harvesting their own firewood.

Becoming self sufficient (or, more aptly, self reliant) has to include, if not begin with, being able to provide not only the peripheral luxuries but also some of the bare necessities for your home and children. Whether or not you have a milk cow in the barn and laying hens in the coop, a home brewery in the basement and a food dehydrator in the kitchen, providing your family with a source of heat is not only extremely cost efficient but quite honestly, with a little education a strong understanding of safety and a willingness to perform some manual labor, is fairly easy to do.

To break down the labor exchange and dismiss the concept that cutting and splitting wood is an Olympic feat, lets perform a breakdown of costs. Depending on the size and construction of your home, the efficiency of your furnace and the type of fuel used, and how much you heat your house out of necessity or to maintain your individual comfort level, the cost for heating your home versus that of your neighbors will vary greatly. Sure there are analysis sent to you by the energy companies supplying your home with electricity and fuels that will compare your consumption with those around you, however, with the factors listed above it is very difficult to truly compare the requirements of one home with those of another. And, depending on where in the world your home is located your heating needs will also be greatly affected. However, for the sake of argument, lets say that on average you pay $150 each calendar month to heat your home during the fall and winter. That equates to $1800 per year to run the furnace for roughly five months. At $360 per cold month that is a lot of cash going out to keep the heat coming in. According to Ycharts.com, an unbiased research and stock charting website, the average hourly wage in America in 2012 is just over $23.50. Therefore, roughly 6.4 hours of your income every month of the year goes to heating your home from October to March. That is nearly 77 hours a year, or, for the typical 40 hour work week, just three hours short of two full weeks of work which for most is one entire paycheck! Of course after you are taxed on your hourly income more of your working hours go towards your gas bill, but, again, for the sake of argument, we will use the 77 hour estimate, which equals roughly $1800 at the end of the year, $18,000 over the course of ten years and $54,000 during the life of a typical 30 year mortgage at today's prices. According to the US Census Bureau (www.census.gov) the median new home value for 2012 in America was $256,000. To calculate the total cost of that mortgage over the course of 30 years at a 4% interest rate with no points, nothing down, and $5,000 in fees and additional costs the total mortgage value after 30 years will be slightly greater than $446,000. If we then add the heating costs of the same 30 years (again, not adjusting for any anticipated cost increases) that price ironically equals exactly half a million dollars at today's value. If, with a little extra work a few weekends a year, you were able to start trimming off some of that astronomical expense, would you change your ability to retire with a little more comfort or possibly assist your children with a little more of their education?

Here in my neck of the wilderness in Northern Utah the average home that heats itself solely with a wood burning stove will use seven to ten cord of wood throughout the fall and winter. After the cost of a wood burning stove ($200 + used – $2500 + new) if your home does not already have one, and the cost of professionally installing all the necessary support structure, hearth, chimney and smoke stack ($$$-$$$$) I will deliver to you seven cord of split wood for you to stack for $175 per cord, or $1225 for an entire years worth. With me doing almost all the work for you, that saves you $575 per year and $17,250 during a 30 year stretch in average heating costs. [I have chosen not to include the price of purchasing and installing a wood burning stove in this equation simply because once it has become a fixture in the home it is no longer a cost, but an equitable investment, you have just increased your homes dollar value with the work you have done.] Now, in addition to that $575 dollar savings, or 24.5 hours at work in a typical year, think of what you could keep in your pocket if you performed all the work of harvesting your firewood instead of having me do it for you. Of course this involves additional equipment, which has to be purchased or rented, fed fuel and oil and kept in proper running condition, but after you buy that chainsaw once, your expenses should be relatively minimal for years and years to come if you take good care of your tools. As for the labor involved, well that all depends on you, your physical abilities, the equipment at your disposal, and your timing. If you wait until the first frost to start cutting and splitting your wood, your going to have to work fast and hard to get it done in time to actually use it for the winter. However, if you perform this work one weekend a month during the warmer months there is absolutely no reason why you cannot have a very large amount of wood cut, split, seasoned, stored, and ready for your stove. In the remainder of this book I will show you exactly how to choose your chainsaw, maintain all of your equipment, pick out the most suitable trees for your firewood, properly and safely fell, limb and buck your trees, transport, split and measure your harvest, and in the end, enjoy not only the fruits of your labors, the heat of your fire, the savings in your wallet, but also your improved health because you actually got off the couch and out into the fresh air for some manual labor for a few days.

As the owner and long time principle operator of a tree removal service I have spent more hours on the business end of a chainsaw in the course of a month than most people spend in their cars throughout the rest of the year. I have climbed and cut literally thousands (if not tens of thousands) of trees in my years in the industry and can honestly claim, though I am no certified expert, that I have a pretty good idea of what I am doing and am more than proficient. From Ponderosa Pine to Honey Locust, Sycamore to Eucalyptus, each tree and species of tree, though different in look, density, and scientific classification, respond the same to the basic laws of physics and the effects of a good chainsaw and a knowledgeable operator. If you are going to be self-reliant and harvest your own firewood it is important that you have that good chainsaw, have become a knowledgeable and safe operator, and have a better than fair understanding of the laws of physics and the effects a falling tree has on the objects it will land on. In order to orient you further I have chosen to start at the very beginning with a short history lesson.

Whether you are a creationist or an evolutionist you can't deny that man today is what he has become because of his ability to harvest the power of heat. Scientifically speaking fire has been used by hominids since the Early Stone Age, or to the more academically inclined, the Lower Paleolithic Era. The more faithful readers understand that fire has always been a companion to man, though the Bible never mentions exactly when God gave fire to him, as early as Genesis fire is mentioned when Abraham utilizes a torch for light and later in the book a descendent of Cain, a son of Adam and Eve and evidently someone from an earlier time than Abraham, is said to have made tools from Bronze with the use of fire. Which ever belief you harbor, early uses for fire were limited to cooking and protection against animals and the elements but man quickly learned to use it for forging metals, rousting witches from the community, as a weapon of war, bar-b-queing, beach side bonfires, igniting fireworks, and even sending our fellow men to the moon. Try to imagine what your life would be like if you did not have the fire in your light bulbs to illuminate your bathroom when you go to take a pee at midnight. Or, how would your daily routine be affected if you did not have a well controlled and contained fire heating your water in that water heater in the basement? How different would the world be if we did not learn to harness combustion in the block of an engine allowing us to provide power to the wheels of our cars and buses? What is so easily taken for granted today began quite literally as a simple spark, a flash of human (or human ancestor) ingenuity.

In the scientific study of human evolution the earliest evidence for the controlled use of fire was at Israels Gesher Benot Ya'agov or GBY, an ancient land crossing from Africa to the Middle East. At this location it is theorized that ancient Homo Erectus, Homo Ergaster, and possibly even very early Homo Sapiens have left charred wood and seeds. It is theorized that they utilized this site over the course of 100,000 years starting roughly 790,000 years ago. A more recent archeological find comes from another Lower Paleolithic site, this one in China named Zhoukoudian dated approximately 400,000 years ago. What does this mean to you? It means that regardless of your religious or scientific inclination mans relationship with fire has lasted longer than the Queens reign in England. Mans ascent to his Earthly hierarchy has relied heavily on fire which has relied heavily on mans ability to obtain the fuels to produce it at will. Fire has been around for so many millennia before our immediate ancestory that it is safe to say that it has been and is an ever increasingly important part of our genetic makeup. Fire simply is (according to many of the worlds leading anthropology theories) the reason man succeeded in becoming the dominant species on Earth! Followed in short order with the use of language, farming and agriculture, and technology. Man has been burning combustibles long enough that without it we would merely be another member of the cockroach family tree, albeit still the dominant species on Earth.

What came first, the fire or the firewood? Simply put, invention is the product of necessity resulting from having access to the required resources and the ability to produce and reproduce the creation at will and with similar results. But with that said it is evident that both fire and firewood were born at the same time, without fire there would be no firewood, without firewood there would be no fire. Which ever belief system you follow, whether God gave fire to Adam and Eve or if it was accidentally discovered by one of our primitive ancestors, fire and combustibles were made aware to us at the same time, and to maintain fire comes the need to have a steady supply of those combustibles. There are a myriad of items in the world and on the market for you to obtain in order to have that fire. Wherever you may be, with a little looking you can find something, somewhere to burn. Over the ages man has burned everything from dried Yaks droppings to processed bricks of combined petroleum, chemical adhesive, and wood byproducts. Between these two extremes you will find that humans have utilized items from dried leaves and grasses, to mined coal and compressed charcoal, to animal fats and refined gasses in order to produce heat and light. So, unless you are going to pay the aforementioned fat cats for their fumes and sludge, or raise Yaks and collect their doodle, firewood is still the most plentiful and easiest to obtain fuel for heating on the planet.

Before you grab a crosscut saw, a willing neighbor and a brick of beer there are a number of things you need to know about harvesting and processing your own firewood. Starting with a little about trees, how to select your harvesting tools, the basics of how to fell a tree, how to measure your firewood, what to expect in the way of weight for transportation, how to split and store your firewood, and lastly, what to expect from your labors in the way of heat output.