How to Keep Outside Firewood Dry

If you have enough room in your garage or porch to keep firewood dry during winter, that's the best solution. However, keeping firewood dry outside in the elements is not difficult. These tips will ensure easy access to dry firewood through the cold winter months.

Things You'll Need

• Wooden pallets
• Tarps big enough to entirely cover the firewood stack

Instructions

1. You have to keep firewood dry from underneath as well as from falling rain and snow. Stacking it on wood pallets is the easiest way to keep it off the wet ground. Check with hardware stores and lumber yards as they sometimes give pallets away, or sell them for very cheap. Get hardwood pallets if you can. The cheap white pine pallets may rot and break under the weight of the firewood. Get your pallets before you have any wood delivered or cut.

2. Stack the firewood on the pallets. If you have differing sizes of logs, sort them onto separate pallets so you are not hunting through the firewood pile for the right sized logs in the dark and snow.

3. Have heavy waterproof tarps large enough to cover your whole stack of firewood. Weight down the edges on the ground so it won't blow off. Unless it never freezes where you live, you'll need to leave one side hanging down and not touching the ground, otherwise the whole tarp will freeze to the ground and you won't be able to get to your firewood. That flap can be held in place by leaning a board or something against it so it won't blow loose.

4. If you live someplace where it rains a lot, your outside firewood will become somewhat damp just from humidity no matter what you do. Bring armloads of wood inside at least a day before you plan to use it so it burns more easily and hotter.

5. At the end of winter, pallets can be stored until next year or even used for a bonfire if that is legal where you live.

Tips & Warnings

• White pine or softwood pallets make handy kindling for starting your fire.

• Depending on your location, be aware that stacks of firewood can provide homes for anything from spiders and snakes to possums, so exercise caution.