I’ve got firewood. Some of it’s wet, and some of it’s dry. What’s my most efficient stacking strategy in the firebox: Dry below wet, wet below dry, or mixed? Assume it’s all seasoned hardwood with standard perpendicular stacking; there isn’t enough room for a teepee configuration.
I should say that by “efficient” I mean “best at heating the room.”
I’d put the dry below, tarp between the layers and sticker the wet. Stickering means to insert small 1/4" - 1/2" shims between the wet pieces to allow airflow. Get some air moving across it with a fan and that will help dry it out.
MikeG, you’re talking about stacking it for drying. The OP is asking about how to stack it in the firebox for burning. Just so everybody’s clear, you shouldn’t use a tarp between layers fo wood in the fireplace.
As for Shoshana’s query, I guess it depends on what you mean by wet wood. If it’s green, you shouldn’t burn it in a fireplace at all. Same goes if it’s been in the rain during the last few days, or covered with snow. Adding this kind of wet wood to dry wood slows the burning process, makes it harder to get started in the first place, and reduces the overall efficiency. A lot of the heat from the good word gets consumed by the process of drying the wet wood. It’s also dangerous, since it causes creosote buildup. So my reccomendation would be to use just dry wood and leave the wet wood for later.
When you’re camping, wet wood is sometimes the only choice, and in that case, the tepee configuration is ideal. Wet wood needs a directed draft to burn, and this configuration creates one. Of course, as you said, there’s not enough room for that in most fireboxes.
If the wet wood is wet from recent rain or covered in snow, and you don’t have enough dry wood to burn just that, then I recommend the following. 1) Burn all of the dry wood first. 2) Stack the wet wood near the fire, close enough so that the heat will help dry the wood. 3) Use the wet wood later when it becomes dry.