Is buying by the face cord always a bad deal?

Not if the piece length is pinned down. A face cord of 16-inch wood is a perfectly usable unit — exactly one-third of a full cord — and a fair seller will quote it that way. The trouble starts when "face cord" floats without a piece length, because the same words can describe anything from a quarter cord (12-inch pieces) to a half cord (24-inch pieces). Convert to full cords or cubic feet before comparing any two prices.

The delivered pile looks smaller than what I ordered. What now?

Stack it ranked and well stowed — parallel, touching, compact — and measure: length × height × (piece length ÷ 12) gives cubic feet, and dividing by 128 gives cords. A loose heap holds noticeably less wood than the same volume stacked, so no conclusion drawn from an unstacked pile will hold up. Do the measurement before burning any of the load, while the quantity claim is still checkable, and settle the difference with the seller in cords.

Why does a cord of oak cost so much more than a cord of pine?

Because you are really buying heat, and oak carries more of it per cord. All species release similar heat per pound of dry wood, so a denser species packs more BTU into the same 128 cubic feet — white oak holds about 29.1 million BTU per dry cord versus 16.2 for ponderosa pine and 15.8 for cottonwood. Divide each asking price by the species’ million BTU per cord: quite often the expensive oak is the cheaper heat.

Can I burn wood that was cut this year?

You can, but you will regret it twice: fresh-cut wood can be one-third water or more, so a large share of its heat goes into boiling that water off instead of warming the room, and the cool smoky burn deposits creosote in the chimney. Wood is ready at roughly 20% moisture, which typically takes 6–12 months split and top-covered — and often more than a year for dense oaks. Buy this winter’s wood last spring.

Cord vs. Face Cord: Buying Firewood Without Getting Shorted

One of these units is defined by law. The other is not.

Firewood is one of the few things Americans still buy by a unit written into weights-and-measures law. NIST Handbook 130 — the Uniform Regulation for the Method of Sale of Commodities, adopted by most US state weights-and-measures programs — defines the cord in §2.4 as "the amount of wood that is contained in a space of 128 cubic feet, when the wood is ranked and well stowed." Ranked and well stowed means pieces parallel, touching, and compactly stacked. Because most states adopt this regulation, sellers must quote firewood in cords or fractions of a cord — not "truckloads," "racks," or "piles," which have no legal meaning at all.

The classic mental picture of a cord is a stack 4 ft tall and 8 ft long of 4 ft (48-inch) wood: 8 × 4 × 4 = 128 cubic feet exactly. But nothing about the definition requires that shape. Any length × height × depth that multiplies out to 128 cubic feet is a cord, which is the key to checking a real delivery — and the reason the arithmetic in the next section is worth five minutes of your time.

The face cord: a unit with a missing dimension

A face cord is a stack with the same 4 × 8 ft face as the classic cord picture — but only one piece deep. That missing third dimension is the whole problem. Nobody burns 48-inch logs in a stove; firewood is cut to stove length, commonly 12 to 24 inches with 16 inches the most common sale length. So a face cord’s actual volume is 32 square feet of face times whatever the piece length happens to be: 42.7 cubic feet at 16 inches, 64 at 24 inches, just 32 at 12 inches.

Run those against the legal 128 and the trap becomes visible. A face cord of 16-inch wood is exactly one-third of a full cord. At 24-inch pieces it is one-half. At 12-inch pieces it is only one-quarter. Two sellers can both say "face cord," charge the same price, and hand over volumes that differ by a factor of two. The classic firewood mistake is paying half-a-cord money for a face cord of short wood — and the seller never technically lied. Whenever you hear "face cord" — or any unit that quotes a face without a depth — the first question is always the same: how long are the pieces?

How to measure the stack in your driveway

Checking a delivery takes a tape measure and one formula. Stack the wood ranked and well stowed — the same condition the legal definition assumes, because a loosely thrown pile holds noticeably less wood in the same space. Then measure the stack’s length and average height in feet, and the piece length in inches. For a single-row stack, the piece length is the stack’s depth, so the volume is length × height × (piece length ÷ 12), and dividing by 128 gives full cords.

A worked check: a seller delivers a stack 16 ft long and 4 ft tall of 24-inch logs. Volume = 16 × 4 × (24 ÷ 12) = 128 cubic feet — exactly one cord, and you can say so with the regulation behind you. Had those same dimensions held 12-inch wood, the stack would be 64 cubic feet: half a cord, at whatever price you agreed to pay for "a cord." Measure before you burn any of it; a stack you have partially fed to the stove is a claim you can no longer make. Our firewood cord calculator runs this exact conversion, including the face-cord fraction at your piece length.

A cord of what? Density is the other half of the deal

A cord is a volume, not a weight — and wood species differ enormously in how much combustible mass they pack into the same 128 cubic feet. Per Utah State University Forestry Extension’s heating table (dry-wood basis), a cord of white oak holds about 29.1 million BTU while a cord of cottonwood holds 15.8 — nearly a 2:1 spread. In between sit sugar maple at 25.5, red oak at 24.6, white ash at 24.2, lodgepole pine at 21.1, birch at 20.8, and Douglas-fir at 20.7 million BTU per cord.

The mechanism is simple: all species release similar heat per pound of dry wood, so the cord-to-cord difference is almost entirely density. Dense hardwood means more pounds — and more heat — in the same stack. It also means that "a cord" is an incomplete description of what you are buying. A fair comparison between two wood deals needs the species as much as it needs the volume.

Compare prices per million BTU, not per cord

Once you know the cords and the species, the honest price axis is dollars per million BTU — the same axis you would use to compare firewood against any other fuel. Consider white oak at $300 per cord against cottonwood at $200. The oak works out to $300 ÷ 29.1 ≈ $10.31 per million BTU; the cottonwood to $200 ÷ 15.8 ≈ $12.66. The "cheaper" cord costs about 23% more per unit of heat — and the light wood also means more loading, more storage space, and more ash for the same warmth.

This is the arithmetic that turns a firewood listing into a decision. A low sticker price on light softwood is frequently the worse deal; a premium on dense oak frequently is not. And if you are weighing wood against your furnace, remember the stack price is only the fuel side: a modern EPA wood stove converts roughly 70–75% of the wood’s heat into the room, and how much heat your house actually needs is a question for a degree-days or heat-loss estimate, not the wood pile.

Seasoned is a number: about 20% moisture

Every heat figure above is for dry wood, and that qualifier has teeth. Green wood can be one-third water or more by weight, and every pound of that water must be boiled off in the firebox before the wood burns — heat that goes up the flue as steam instead of into the room. Worse, the cool, smoky fire that wet wood produces promotes creosote in the chimney, which is a fire hazard rather than a mere inefficiency.

"Seasoned" should therefore be treated as a measurable claim, not an adjective: firewood is ready when its moisture drops to roughly 20%. Getting there takes time — split and top-covered, most wood needs 6 to 12 months, and dense oaks often need a year or more. When a seller offers seasoned wood, ask how long it has sat split and top-covered — that is the condition the seasoning clock runs in. If you are buying green wood at a discount to season yourself, price it accordingly and plan the stack a year ahead.