Maple questions

[woodhounder]

Is red maple better or worse than silver maple? I have not seen a BTU chart that has them listed seperately. I have not burned any red maple so I do not know.

Also, does anybody know anything about Norway maple? I am guessing that it rates somewhere between silver and suger.

 

[Wife'nHubby]

http://www.chimneysweeponline.com/howood.htm

The above chart has sugar maple (24) and red maple (18).

Shari

 

[woodhounder]

is silver maple also at 18?

 

[Dalmatian90]

Red and silver maple are closely related, and can hybridize with each other...so I'd expect them to be the same.

My experience is the quality of the wood varies dramatically by where it's growing.

Red maple with wet roots doesn't split nicely, and is soaking wet. Seasons quickly though.

Red maple with dry roots -- away from streams, ponds, intermittent streams -- has a straight grain that is easy to split, and is much drier wood in the late fall / early spring.

 

[Wife'nHubby]

Question on Maple wood: Around here I often hear the term "hard Maple". Is this red, silver or sugar maple?

Shari

 

[woodhounder]

Question on Maple wood: Around here I often hear the term "hard Maple". Is this red, silver or sugar maple?

Shari

Hard maple is sugar maple.

 

[vincem77]

Norway maple are also commonly mislabeled with the term hard maple. Somewhere in between silver and sugar i believe for BTU's. Most of my craigslists scores are maple around here, and the homeowner very seldom knows the accurate species so I show up regardless of what they call it.

 

[Oldtimer]

Red Maple has more BTU value than Silver. Hard Maple has more than any other Maple by far.

 

[blackdogon57]

Hard maple is sugar maple.

:agree2::agree2:

silver/red/swamp/manitaba maple are not as good to burn. Personally I will gladly burn any of them and just about any kind of wood as long as it is dry and clean.

 

[banshee67]

i came across a bunch of hard maple a few weeks ago, several of my regular firewood customers didnt want it because they didnt understand what it was or how hard of wood it is. when you say maple most people instinctively think silver maple right away

 

[woodhounder]

Norway maple are also commonly mislabeled with the term hard maple. Somewhere in between silver and sugar i believe for BTU's. Most of my craigslists scores are maple around here, and the homeowner very seldom knows the accurate species so I show up regardless of what they call it.

:agree2: most homeowers don't know the species (some woodcutters don't know either) but there is a worlds worth of difference between silver and sugar.

 

[Wife'nHubby]

:agree2: most homeowers don't know the species (some woodcutters don't know either) but there is a worlds worth of difference between silver and sugar.

Boy, you sure can say that again! We burnt 'hard maple' for most of this last winter, ran out of that, and switched to silver maple. What a difference! The silver maple sure burnt up a lot faster that the 'hard' maple we were previously burning.

New wood burner here - live and learn.

Thanks for the replies to my question.

Shari

 

[danrclem]

I usually burn oak and locust when I can so I don't have a lot of experience with maple. The main reason that I don't burn much maple is because I've had it to go punky on me in the barn.

I cut up some maple a few years ago but I didn't get all of it thinking that it was a soft maple. After I split it and put it in the barn to dry it turned a deep honey looking color and was some good wood. I didn't think that it was sugar maple because the leaf just didn't look right for a sugar. Any ideas what it may have been?

 

[Wood Doctor]

Dan said, "The main reason that I don't burn much maple is because I've had it to go punky on me in the barn."
--------------
Same here. Soft maple will dry rot faster than any species I know of, and that includes cottonwood. Compared to soft maple, cottonwood has excellent rot resistance.

Maybe that's why ants enjoy eating soft maple from the inside out and hollow out the trees.

 

[AIM]

I'd have to think the BTU difference between red and silver would be negligible.
Silver maple is great wood for early fall and spring. In my OWB it's not horrible in the winter either if the pieces are big. I burned it for the first time this winter/spring and was VERY surprised and pleased.
It's an often overlooked wood that has it's place.

 

[Pain Cow]

The BTU charts are interesting. But I'm a scrounger and an opportunist. I don't walk up to a discarded pile of silver maple logpile and check a 'not acceptable' box on my clipboard&walk away. I literally get tons of silver maple every year. A BTU snob I aint, and silver maples grow like weeds around here.

 

[Oldtimer]

I'd have to think the BTU difference between red and silver would be negligible.
Silver maple is great wood for early fall and spring. In my OWB it's not horrible in the winter either if the pieces are big. I burned it for the first time this winter/spring and was VERY surprised and pleased.
It's an often overlooked wood that has it's place.

Silver = 19 million BTUs per cord

Red = about 25 million BTUs per cord.

6 million BTUs is enough to heat a home for a week in cold weather.

 

[Dalmatian90]

(Figures million BTUs per cord unless noted)
Silver: 17
Red: 18.6
http://www.ibiblio.org/london/perma...t-archives-1999-2002-oldversion/msg04787.html

Red: 18.7
http://mb-soft.com/juca/print/firewood.html

Red: 18.1
http://firewoodresource.com/firewood-btu-ratings/

Silver: 22.1
Red: 24.5
http://www.asootysolution.com/Firewood_101.html

Silver: 19
Red: 18.7
http://www.demesne.info/Garden-Help/Trees-Shrubs/Firewood-hard.htm

Silver: 20.8
http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G5450

So take your pick of numbers. But none that list both show a really dramatic difference between the two, at most 10% more in the Red.

 

[Medman23]

Here the maple I get is almost exclusively the "hard" variety - sugar, or hard maple (acer saccarum) is the best. Red maple (swamp maple, acer rubrum) is available, but not as common. Other types of maple that make appearances are the silver, norway, and japonese maple. All are lower in BTU's, and the ornamental maples tend to dry-rot as noted above. Also, because they grow so quickly, they are often weaker than other maple species and thus are downed in windstorms, leading to those great craigslist posts we all love.

I try to burn only red oak, hard maple, and yellow birch here. Sometimes I get a bit of white birch mixed in with a load of logs, but not often. White birch tends to dry-rot in storage too, and the ants like it more than the harder woods.
Lots of cedar and pine for starting fires and shoulder season burns too.

 

[ct greenman]

I dont know the BTU for norway maple but it splits very nice with a maul. This is going to be my first winter burning sense I was a teen. When I burnt before it was all oak and hickory. Great hard wood but what a :censored: to split. I get free wood from work so I take what I can get. Maybe when I get a huge amount of wood then I can be picky but if the norway burns good I will look for it and it splits easy. Oh did I say the norway grows everywhere here.