It gets cold in Nova Scotia. My house uses electric heat which is expensive, so I burn wood on cold days. I burn about four face cords of wood over the winter (a Face Cord is 16" x 4' x 8' of wood)
Wood needs to be cut, seasoned (dried), delivered, split and stacked before the season starts. Wood comes in hardwood (like Maple) or softwood (like Spruce). Hardwood is better for burning. With tax, a face cord of hardwood, cut, split and delivered costs as much as $250 from a reputable supplier. The low end of the price range is about $200, but the moisture content or mix of hard/soft wood may vary. It takes about a year or more for wood to be seasoned enough to be suitable for drying. I can buy 8' lengths of hardwood for about $100/fc. As you can easily deduce, it can cost $1000 for enough wood to last the winter, but it can be much cheaper if you're willing to do some of the work yourself.
Buying unseasoned wood is even cheaper, but it means I need to store two loads of wood on my property. One for the current season, one for the next season. Eight cords of wood takes up a lot of room, so I try not to do that.
Recently, I've been getting wood from friends who don't burn. They have large wooded lots and often lose trees to wind storms, etc. I've been able to get enough wood from them to not have to buy from a supplier. But it comes at a cost. To rent a trailer capable of carrying the weight of a load of wood is about $40/day. You can lug a lot of wood in a day. If the wood isn't cut to 16" lengths, you are also looking at getting the chainsaw out and slicing it up. Assume you're going to destroy a chainsaw chain during this process (resharpening about 5-6 times), so this is about $20. Then you need to split the wood. Rental of a splitter, here, is about $50 for 4 hrs or $80/day. I can split about a face cord of wood per hour. Assume an hour to get the splitter and bring it back. I could buy a splitter for about $2000 and a good trailer for about $2000.
It's a lot of work. Getting fell lumber from friends usually means I have to move it, recut it to size, split it, and stack it. I probably touch each piece of firewood about eight times by the time it gets in the stove. It's tremendous exercise. I like being outdoors in the cool air doing physical labor. It's an added bonus and cheaper than a gym membership. It can, however, be dangerous. You're working with heavy loads of wood, chainsaws, hydraulic splitters and falling trees. It could be done faster with more people, but coordinating the extra manpower is a pain ... unless there's a beer incentive, but that has to be factored into the cost.
I assume I'm going to run out of this supply of free wood from friends in a couple of years. And I'm sure there is a Lost Opportunity Cost given the number of hours I spend on this vs. something else I could be doing that is either making or saving me more money.
The question is, should I continue to scrounge the wood, lug, cut and split it myself or have 8' lengths delivered to process? Should I just pay the price and have cut, split & seasoned wood delivered at the end of each summer ... sort of Just-In-Time Delivery? How should I factor in the obvious exercise component of all of this work? Should I buy unseasoned wood and have a two-year pipeline in the works? Should I invest in a trailer and a splitter to reduce the time travelling to the rental shop and for the convenience of being able to work at my own pace?
Don't know? Ask your Head of Engineering. They should be able to knock this problem out on the back of a napkin in short order. They have to make these decisions all the time. Should we license a third-party component, use Open Source or build it ourselves? Should we hire three more bodies or reorganize the project? Should we tackle this technical debt now or defer until a future iteration?
As programmers, we spend a lot of time stacking firewood. Or splitting firewood. Or moving firewood. We don't take the time to stand back, look at the overall process and wonder if what we're doing is efficient or financially sound. Don't assume that when a developer has "turned into a shirt" that they've lost their problem solving skills. They're just tackling new problems which can be just a challenging. The big difference is that there's often more human interaction (politics) involved in getting a solution.
3 comments:
Cool post, both from a home heating perspective and a technology management perspective.
That was a very well written article. Being from Los Angeles I have no experience with firewood, and enjoyed the rather foreign process. Then at the end you really brought it full circle. Very nice!
Nicely put Sandy. This is a road I have travelled many times and all the routes you discuss here. I can't make comment on the developer connection, but I burned wood for over 25 years and obtained it in many ways. While living in Dartmouth in our first house, I bought 8' lengths and bought a chainsaw to "chunk" it up my self. A ton of work but great exercise like you say. I rented a gas powered splitter a few times, but mostly I split by hand. This was a fantastic process, not just exercise, but it grew to be a very Zen like activity for me. Sort of at one with the edge of my splitting axe and the grain of the log. I know. I eventually moved to the Valley and bought a 16' flat bead trailer, truck, more saws and even sold wood for a while. Big investment. My next step was to open my own Wood Stove store which I ran successfully for 20 years. I became WETT certified in 89 and was National President then President of WETT Nova Scotia for quite a while. All this time advising folks on how to cleanly and safely process their own firewood. We will have to chat about this more over something aged in Wood barrels Sir. Oh and by the way, a face cord is an illegal measure for firewood in Canada. Worked on a project with Measurement Canada.
Later
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