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Streblerm

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Most all of my firewood is scrounged from city lots close to home. Well it doesn’t get much closer to home than home.

I’ve had a couple trees that needed taken out. One was a declining black walnut that has already damaged the house and the other was a multi stemmed black locust with included bark that hung over both my neighbors house and mine.

I had them taken down last week and now the work begins. For size comparison that log is 40” DBH and that’s my 394 with a 34” bar sitting on top. It ended up being two pickup loads.

Man am I out of shape. Took me all day but there’s not a trace left in the yard after lots of noodling and the fiskars isocore.

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Most all of my firewood is scrounged from city lots close to home. Well it doesn’t get much closer to home than home.

I’ve had a couple trees that needed taken out. One was a declining black walnut that has already damaged the house and the other was a multi stemmed black locust with included bark that hung over both my neighbors house and mine.

I had them taken down last week and now the work begins. For size comparison that log is 40” DBH and that’s my 394 with a 34” bar sitting on top. It ended up being two pickup loads.

Man am I out of shape. Took me all day but there’s not a trace left in the yard after lots of noodling and the fiskars isocore.

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Nice work. Was that a very valuable black walnut tree? :yes:
 
Nice work. Was that a very valuable black walnut tree? :yes:


I estimate there about a cord of it so it’s Probably worth about $150-200 after it’s cut, split, stacked and seasoned.

I thought about milling it but it’s pretty rotten. I think it’s just going to be firewood. Lots of people don’t like it but I get good heat out of it after it dries for a couple years. I think it burns like hard maple but it dries like oak. It splits easy and smells nice when you burn it.
 
The guys did a nice job. They usually chip up to 20” but a asked them to leave as much wood as they could without slowing them down. They crane the tree right into the chipper. They were done in under 4hrs.

I estimate 4-5 cords left behind. It still hurt to see nice straight 10-16” stuff go into the chipper.

I guess it saved me about $500 not having them haul the wood out or cut it to length.

The foreman asked me if I was sure I wanted the big stuff or that I didn’t want it cut to length. After I showed him the six chainsaws on the bench and told him it would be a good opportunity to exercise the 394 he realized I knew what I was asking for.
 

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Depends on how much he had to pay the crew. My high was $850 to remove a good sized spruce from the backyard.
I dropped $1200 to a crew that took down a 45' tall pin oak in my back yard. Hit by indirect lightning, it was electrocuted in early spring of 2017, cooked on the inside and killed instantly:
Pin Oak Tree5.JPG
That trunk was 3' across. Almost all of the branches looked like this on the inside. The tree had a full crown in December and no leaves at all the fallowing year. There were no burn marks anywhere on the outside, truly a freak of nature. Some say the tree may have saved considerable damage to my house.
 
Wood Doctor, did you consider asking your insurance company if they would pay for the tree removal? The tree did maybe save damage to your house. Likely wouldn't hurt to ask.
Never hurts to ask. When we were still in business, the power company would take down any part of a removal that was over their wires. Only thing is they would leave you a giant mess to clean up. It looked like they did twice as much work to make a mes. Last year a friends parents had a big Oak splitting about 30 feet up. I told them to call the power company and ask them? The inspector came out and said, Yep, that's a bad one". The next morning they heard noise in the front yard. Asplundh had a bucket truck on the lawn working the tree down. They ground all the brush, dumped the chips next door, and left the log for me, all free. Turns out about ten years ago, we had a major storm go through, and the power was out for about 3 weeks. Some people filed a class action suite against the power company for not maintaining proper clearance of the wires. Now if anything is close, they just take it down. Not the same as an insurance claim. Just saying it never hurts to ask?
 
Wood Doctor, did you consider asking your insurance company if they would pay for the tree removal? The tree did maybe save damage to your house. Likely wouldn't hurt to ask.
The deductible is too high, far above the cost to remove the tree. Insurance companies are in business to make money. If the tree had dropped on the house, car, or truck, that's a different story. The damage to the house or vehicle would have been covered somewhat, but the cost to remove the tree would still stare you in the face.

I sold almost all the firewood that the tree produced or heated my house with it. Instant firewood in this case because there was practically no moisture remaining in the wood. The moisture in the wood was converted to steam and expelled.
 
I was wondering because we had a lawn care client who had 3 of 5 dead ash trees on their property removed. They wanted all 5 down but they said they didn't have the money to do it. Yup, few days later we had high winds and with the 3 trees gone one of the remaining trees blew over and landed on neighbours house and garage. Insurance had to pay for all the damage, they should have just covered the trees first. It's going to be a big issue around here soon because the ash are all dead and will be falling soon. We have a local cottage association that wants the Township to raise taxes and create a fund to remove all ash trees in their little community. I say screw that they can pay for their own tree removals the same as I do. The farmers around me agreed, why should their taxes go up just so the Townies can have free removals?
 
When we were in business, the insurance companies in Maryland, only pay to have the tree "removed from the insured structure, to the ground." That did not include any removal from the property. So, we worded our estimates, "propose to remove storm damaged tree from house, garage, fence, to the ground". Then we would slip a business card between the copies and continue, "and remove debris from yard". That way our top copy had the full details, and the customer copy only had the Insurance details. Another thing, people often think if your neighbors tree falls on your house, the neighbors insurance should pay. Wrong. You pay your insurance to cover your house, they pay to cover their house. It's the house that's insured, so the company that insures "that" house that pays.
 
Preventative measures would make sense, especially in the case of a disease killed tree like the Ash. If it was just a dead tree, the Insurance companies would have a case that the home owner new the tree was in poor health for a period of years and just let it go, till it fell, to keep from paying. In the case of an epidemic, I don't have the answer. The insurance companies would probably just let them fall, figuring their odds would be the tree would miss anything covered.
 
The insurance agent said that if the tree had fallen on the house while it was being cut down and caused about $6 grand in damages to the house, a claim might be justified. However, usually the removal company has liability insurance. Otherwise, any tree removal expense is just ordinary property maintenance, like having the lawn mowed or a hedge trimmed.
 
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