Can you burn Green wood?

I have no experience with wood heaters. Back in the old days in South Africa we had a fire place with chimney in the lounge and used to burn coal and occasional wood or some wood to get he fire started. The house had a big brick coal bin for storage that would get filled up once a year.

Did a quick google and the only coal the I could find for domestic sales was a coking coal for blacksmiths, a good quality at a very high price.



I always wondered why the wood burners in Australia make so much smoke - so I asked the guys at work in Cobar NSW they say they just put two logs in and cut the airflow to almost zero and the logs smoulder away giving of a constant low heat, that way they can keep the house warm and go through very little firewood.



Burning green wood in a camp fire just makes a lot of smoke and can be a pain to keep alight - so if there is a wood shortage where I am camping I mix it up with dry and green wood at 3:1 ratio. A good fire makes it own upward thermal draft - green wood could get a bit smokey, and there are plenty of people who have died in confined areas due to smoke/CO.



A few random thoughts - I have never used an indoor wood burner....

Can you burn green wood,,,, yes of course you can, it is just not very efficient and wastes a lot of wood for not much heat, but if you have no alternative you can.

I use to be an agent for a mob called TechWood that perfected a saw dust combustion furnace for saw mills to burn the green saw dust as it comes off newly cut green timber. The secret is to drive the moisture out of it by using some of the heat you get, the furnaces used screw augers to make a pile of saw dust in the middle of a hearth then around the pile introduce pre-heated air in a cyclonic style. Then the pile would burn from the outside in, while the fuel was being introduced from the inside - out. The combustion gases contain tars, creosotes and of course moisture which then passed to another secondary combustion chamber which introduced heated combustion air causing it to burn very hot and clean.

All a bit hard to do with just a domestic wood heater burning logs of wood. So if you must burn green wood, I would recommend cutting the wood into extra small sizes to help it dry, and if your brave enough pre-dry the wood either on top or near the sides of the heater....which runs the risk of course of it catching fire so watch out, that will help. Because a normal heater does not have a secondary combustion chamber, you will need to watch that your chimney does not get layered with tars etc and cause you a chimney fire. So if your burning green wood pay extra attention to your chimney as a tar build up as it only has two methods of being removal, manually cleaning it off, or a chimney fire in which it burns off....      If your running a wood heater with a stainless steel flue, you probably want to avoid a chimney fire, if you never experienced one, generally what happens is the flue will glow red hot, as it passes through your ceiling cavity, and outside flames and sparks will be coming out the top like a roman candle.

In the old days with open fires and chimneys the fire brigade was called and they would use water to put the fire out making a huge mess. With a wood heater closing off the the fire air supply will generally bring things under control, but if it dose not, then water may have to be used to put the fire out.

I did know one bloke who dried some wood in his microwave oven, but I'm not recommended it, since steam caught in the wood could cause the wood to explode, and as the moisture in the wood reduces it is also like running the oven empty and could damage the magnetron......that is also ignoring the fact the inside of the over would be getting a thin coating of tars and creosotes which are probably not good eating.