Nothing beats gathering around a campfire in the wide open plains with your friends and family. It is a scene worthy of a movie still or a poster and is really one of the happiest memories people can have. Of course, building a campfire or a bonfire isn’t really as easy as the movies made it out to be. You would often see people simply looking for broken pieces of wood or cutting a tree branch to start making a fire. Yet, in real life, doing this and expecting a healthy burning fire in a couple of minutes is impossible. Now if you really want to make a good burning fire, then you need to get some firewood that is designed to make camp fires easy. For cases like these, it is best to get a Kiln Dried Firewood.
The Properties of Wood
You would think that wood being wood, it would be very easy to ignite it and cause a forest fire. However, it really isn’t as simple as that. Especially for fresh wood that was still part of a tree a couple of minutes ago, it would try to resist burning as much as it can. This is because wood contains moisture—a lot of it, in fact. Trees are living organisms and they get water from the soil using their roots. This means that the majority of the wood is, in fact, water. This makes it hard from wood to start a fire and burn since the moisture content inside will have to be evaporated away before the wood can start burning properly. Different trees have different moisture content and will thus burn differently. By drying the wood, you are stabilising the wood and making it easier to burn.
What Is Kiln Drying
A kiln is a big oven typically used for pottery. Kiln Dried Firewood is essentially wood planks that have been dried inside a big oven. It is hot enough to coerce water to evaporate but is nowhere near the temperature that can set the pieces of wood into flames. By doing this, the total moisture content of the wood is reduced so that it can become a great campfire fodder. In stabilising the wood, the entire length of the wood will behave uniformly as there are no areas that have higher moisture levels.
This also brings about other advantages. First of all, wet wood tends to burn inefficiently. If you have ever seen a campfire with black smoke, then the wood used is damp and wet or at least have a lot of water in them. The water decreases the temperature of the burning wood which causes incomplete combustion of the wood particles which causes the formation of soot.
For sellers and manufacturers, dried wood is a lot better since they are lighter in weight making transport a lot easier. Since they burn nicely, they are also of a higher quality which means they can be sold at a much higher price. Also, wood boring insects are also killed in the drying process which ensures that your firewood won’t get eaten by bugs so you get to sell more of them.