Firewood Storage That Stays Dry: Sheds, Racks, Cords and the Ontario Seasoning Math

Reading Time: 13 minutes

How much firewood an Ontario winter takes

A rural Ontario home heated mainly with wood burns four to seven full cords a winter, according to Firewood Plus, a supplier in Marmora, and that range is the number every storage decision starts from. A small, well-insulated house with a modern stove sits at the low end; a drafty farmhouse with an older stove and a January in the Ottawa Valley sits at the top. The variables are the house, the insulation, the winter, the species and the appliance. A modern EPA-rated stove cuts wood use by roughly a quarter to a third against an older one, and an open fireplace burns about half again as much wood for the same heat because most of it goes up the flue. A cottage used on weekends, or a house that burns for the pleasure of it in November and March, is a one-cord-a-year household and stores accordingly. We sell steel boxes, and the honest part of this page comes late: a sealed container is the wrong place to season wood and the right place to keep the dry stock and the splitter, which is where the smokehouse guide’s seasoned-hardwood section and this one agree. A yard-mounted wood boiler burns from the same stacks, and where a furnace’s seasoned cords can sit near its loading door comes down to the clearance page in its manual.

Full cord, face cord, stove cord

A full cord, called a bush cord in much of Ontario, is a stacked pile 4 feet high, 4 feet deep and 8 feet long: 128 cubic feet, roughly 600 to 800 pieces, weighing 3,000 to 5,000 pounds depending on species and dryness. A face cord is the same 4 by 8 face one piece deep, and since most firewood is cut to 16 inches, a face cord is about a third of a full cord. A stove cord is a face cord cut to 12 inches for compact stoves and is a quarter of a full cord. The units matter twice: once when you buy, because a seller quoting a low price per face cord is quoting a third of what a bush-cord seller is, and once when you build, because the shed is sized in full cords and the wood arrives in the seller’s unit. The wood shed guide’s chapter on what enters the shed makes the same point about the mower’s turning radius; with firewood the equivalent is the tractor or the dump trailer that brings a bush cord to the door of the shed rather than to the lawn beside it.

Seasoning: the 20 percent line

Seasoned firewood is wood with a moisture content under 20 percent, and the number is the whole reason storage matters. Green hardwood comes off the saw at 40 percent and more. Burned wet, it hisses, throws smoke, starves the fire of heat, and condenses tar in the flue as creosote, which is the leading cause of chimney fires and the reason a WETT-certified sweep looks at the chimney once a year. The same tar is why a stove in a small steel room, the kind the hunt camp build’s stove chapter describes, wants dry wood even more than a house does. Most Ontario species reach 20 percent in about six months of good drying; dense hardwoods take longer, and oak in particular wants a second summer. Ash is the exception that can be burned soon after cutting because it is dry on the stump. The tests are old and reliable: seasoned wood is grey rather than cream, the ends have opened into checks, two pieces knocked together ring rather than thud, and a pin moisture meter on a freshly split face reads below 20. Firewood Plus ranks the province’s species for the stove, with ironwood, rock elm, hickory, oak, sugar maple, beech and yellow birch in the top tier; ash, red elm, red maple, tamarack and white birch in the middle; and the softwoods, poplar, pine, spruce, hemlock and basswood, for kindling and shoulder-season fires. The drying happens in the stack, in moving air, under a roof, which is the specification for the building in the next section.

The shed that dries wood, and the shed that rots it

A firewood shed is a roof on posts with a floor off the ground, one solid wall against the prevailing wind, and either no walls or slatted walls on the other three sides. The open front faces the house or the lane so the wood can be loaded and unloaded without a corner, and the roof overhangs the front stack by a foot or more so the rain that blows in lands on the ground rather than the top row. The slats, where they are used, are boards with 2- to 4-inch gaps, enough for wind to pass through the stack and not enough for the stack to spill. The solid wall goes on the northwest side in most of southern Ontario, because that is where the driving rain and the January wind come from, and the roof pitches away from the open front so the drip line is at the back. Depth is the decision that separates a shed that dries from a shed that stores: two rows of 16-inch pieces, about 3 feet, dry well from both sides; four rows deep in a shed with solid sides is a damp core that never seasons. The cost drivers on a built shed apply to the frame and the roof, and the rule that a shed is only as good as its base applies harder here, because a firewood floor carries two tons a cord.

Racks, covers and the porch pile

The firewood rack is the most-searched item in this whole subject and the least understood. A rack is a steel or timber frame that holds a face cord or two off the ground with open sides and a fitted cover over the top few inches. It does not season wood at any speed worth planning around; it holds seasoned wood dry and within reach, which is why it belongs on the porch, under the eave, or beside the door of the shed. The rules for a rack are the rules for the shed in miniature: off the ground on its own feet, bark side up on the top row so the bark sheds water, cover the top and never the sides, and keep it a hand’s width away from any wall it sits beside so air moves behind it and the siding stays dry. Indoors, a rack by the stove holds a day or two; more than that and the wood brings its insects and its moisture into the house. A rack against a steel wall has the same rule as a rack against wood siding, and the rust page’s note on things stacked against a container explains why the gap matters there too.

Sizing the shed to the cords

A full cord stacked 4 feet high covers 32 square feet of floor; the trade rule is to plan 64 square feet of covered floor per cord, because a shed that is packed edge to edge cannot be loaded, picked from or dried, and a 20 percent margin on top of that pays for the aisle and the air. An 8 by 12 foot shed, 96 square feet, holds a comfortable cord and a half two rows deep and can be pushed to two and a half stacked high and deep. A 10 by 20, 200 square feet, a little more floor than a twenty-foot container’s 160, holds three to four cords the same way, which is a medium house’s winter. The better plan for a house that burns four cords or more is two sheds or one shed with a divider, so this winter’s wood comes out of one side while next winter’s seasons in the other and the two never mix. Height beyond 6 feet at the open front is wasted, because nobody stacks above their shoulders safely and the top rows are the ones that need the roof closest. The sizes hub’s cubic-metre table is a useful check for anyone converting cords into a building, since a cord is 3.6 cubic metres and a 20-foot container’s 33 cubic metres is, on paper, nine cords, a number that matters in the section on closed buildings below.

The base, the wall and the wind

The base of a firewood shed carries more weight per square foot than a garden shed ever will, and it has to breathe. The two answers that work are a compacted gravel pad, which drains and costs least, and pressure-treated runners or a pallet deck lifted 4 to 6 inches above grade so air moves under the bottom row. Bare ground is the one base that fails every time; the bottom row wicks water, rots, and takes the row above with it. On clay, which is most of Brant, Oxford and Waterloo counties, the gravel pad wants to be proud of the surrounding grade so meltwater leaves rather than pools, which is the same lesson a drained stone pad under a steel box teaches. The wall goes where the weather comes from. Face the solid side northwest, put the open front toward the house so the winter path is short and shovelled, and keep the shed where the plow’s windrow will not bury the front. The site-prep hub’s notes on frost and drainage cover the ground; the rest is orientation.

Closed buildings, honestly

A closed building, a garage bay, a sealed shed or a shipping container, does not season firewood, and any page that says otherwise has not stacked green maple in one. The wood gives up its water into a room that cannot shed it, the room’s air reaches saturation, the walls sweat, and the stack grows mould before it dries. A closed building with real ventilation is a different thing: with a low intake on one end and a high exhaust on the other, a room moves enough air to keep seasoned wood seasoned, to keep the dry bank dry through a wet November, and to stop the splitter and the saws rusting. That is the honest role of a container in a firewood operation. It is not the seasoning shed. It is the vault for the wood that is already dry, the equipment that cuts and splits it, and, for the household that heats with wood on a rural lot, a locked room for the two cords that have to stay dry no matter what the winter does. A container’s other virtue is that it is nine cords of volume on paper and a lockable steel floor in practice, which is more than a wooden shed can say when the wood inside it is worth stealing, a point the container security guide makes about anything with resale value.

The vented steel dry bank

The dry bank is a twenty-foot container with a louvred vent at each end, one low and one high on opposite walls, set on a stone pad with the doors toward the house, holding the winter’s seasoned wood on pallets, the splitter, the chainsaws, the fuel and the kindling. The wood goes in dry, in the fall, on pallets so air moves under it, stacked bark up with a gap at the walls. The vents keep the air moving through the winter so the box does not sweat on the first warm day in March; the roof-drip page explains what happens without them. A ten-foot box does the same for a cottage or a one-cord household, and the ten-foot unit’s footprint is close to the 8 by 12 shed most people build. The doors are the doors that crossed an ocean, the lock sits behind a shroud, and a bush cord of maple with a resale value stops being the easiest thing on the property to steal. For a hunt camp or an off-grid cabin, the dry bank is the same box the camp already uses for gear, and the hunting camp build and the off-grid cabin conversion both have a wood stove at the centre of them.

Grade for a dry bank is the easy call: wind-and-watertight, the grade the firewood box needs, is a sealed used unit with surface rust that a wood lot never minds; cargo-worthy is the upgrade if it will be lifted later. What moves the number is size, grade, the vents and the distance from Brantford, and the drivers on a small-box quote are the same on every quote we write. We sell outright, never rent, and the ten- and twenty-footers in the rows can be walked at the Brantford yard before the truck is booked. Worth the drive for unbeatable quality, family customer service with 30 years of experience.

The firewood storage checklist

A stack managed that way is a warm house and a clean chimney, and the shed that made it possible cost a weekend and some posts. The container against every other building, compared, is the next read for the household that is also deciding where the tractor sleeps.

Reach Van Blanc in Brantford

We have been supplying shipping containers across Ontario since 1995. Our yard is at 90 Morton Avenue East in Brantford, and we deliver right across the province with payment on the day of delivery. No deposit, no upfront wires, no chase-the-paperwork.

Van Blanc Ent. Inc., 90 Morton Ave E Unit 1B, Brantford, ON N3R 7J7, 519-754-6844 (cell) or 1-888-509-6658 (toll-free).

If the shed is built and the dry cords, the splitter and the saws need a room that locks, call with the cord count and your postal code, and we will tell you on the spot which boxes are on the ground and when one can land. Worth the drive for unbeatable quality, family customer service with 30 years of experience.

Related Reading

• Wood Sheds in Ontario: The Honest Guide
• Smokehouses and Curing Buildings
• Sugar Shacks and Sugar Bushes in Ontario
• Container Ventilation Guide
• Shipping Container Hunting Camps in Ontario