windthrown
361 Junkie
Yah, that's the way it is. The actual hardness or density of the wood has little to do with the classification of species. Hardwoods have a more complex structure than softwoods. The main difference separating them is the presence of pores in hardwoods. Poplar and willow are classified as hardwoods, but they are pretty light weight and rather soft. Yew is classified as a softwood, but it is rather hard. Go figure.
As for heat value in cordwood, hardness is not the quality that you want for heat. What you want is density. While poplar/cottonwood can get hard when dry, it still is not very dense. Hence they are used a lot in pallets, but that is mainly because it is pretty useless for anything else (other than paper). Oak is a fork of a lot better for heating with. Oak is used in a lot of pallets here as well, and I always pick them up if I come across them. They are heavy muthers though.
On top of all of this are wood pellets (not to be confused with pallets). While dense hardwoods are what you want in wood for wood stoves, conifer/softwood is what you want for pellet stoves. There are several reasons, but softwoods do not coal up and they are very low in ash. Since you are buying pellets by weight and not by volume like cordwood, softwood pellets are better. They generally sell for a premium for that reason. We have mountains of premium conifer/softwood pellets here in the PNW, and not much demand for them. They are a byproduct of the lumber industry. They sell here for 2/3 of what they go for back east (less than $200 a ton).
