Firewood Prep & Briquette Making

Hubby, chopping the pre-measured logs already seasoned for a year (on his left), for this coming winters woodstove fires.

We like using fir and cedar for kindling but, as you can see, this is "Alder" wood which is one of the best hardwoods as it doesn't do the sparking and little pitch explosions and burns nice and hot when seasoned. However, keep in mind that "Alder" wood does get a lot of mold when stored so not so g...

One side of the wood shed swept and cleaned for storing new bucked wood.... this wood shed holds a little over 3 cords... we are making others for storing seasoned logs we harvest from our property... we have found a lot of down trees and take down the "widow makers" to keep us and the animals safe.

Some of the wood stacked, we have some Cedar for kindling and we have Alder for the main burn on this particular year. We like fir best though.

We store smaller limbs in boxes for easy grabs adjacent to the stacked wood as medium sized kindling. Throughout the summer, I make stacks of fine branches for tinder and tie them into bundles. Everything is sized so that it fits the wood stove easily...

I save newspapers for about a year to have enough to make briquettes for the year... It takes a lot of news papers (a couple of big garbage bags full) to have enough for a good amount of briquettes. Here I am prepping 1 inch strips of newspaper to make paper briquettes. I use 5 gallon buckets norma...

Here I am pushing down and soaking the newspaper strips in water for 24 hours before pressing the paper.

I have a recycled garden store planter (about 10 inches wide) and drilled more holes around the sides so that the water escapes when I press down.

The next day I put the soaked strips into the pot with the holes, to a 5 inches height of wet newspaper and then compress it... gotta eyeball amount. It compresses down to about a 2 1/2- 3 inch height briquette.

I put in a smaller pot with a flat bottom and press down, I also use a flat piece of wood to help press down and not hurt my hands.

This is what it looks like after the newspaper briquette is pressed. At this stage, you will turn it over and tap on the bottom to release the briquette.

I lay out the briquettes in the sun for a 2-3 days until they are throughly dry. So these are quite big but, I will put them through the saw making about 6 pie wedges for storage.

Briquette sliced in half to see compact paper but end up quartering this round of briquette.

Briquette upclose.

Every summer, we have to prep for winter firewood and briquette making... here are some pictures of how we prep...

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