Firewood
The best firewood to burn, honestly
There is no one best firewood. There's the best wood for keeping a house warm, the best wood for an evening in front of the fireplace, and a short list of things that should never go in either. Same woodpile, three different questions.
If you're heating: the densest wood you can get seasoned
For a stove or a furnace, weight is heat. The dense hardwoods at the top of the extension charts — oak, hickory, black locust, osage-orange — pack the most warmth into each cord, burn slowly, and leave coals that hold a fire overnight, which is the difference between waking up to embers and waking up to a cold stove.
| Species | Heat per cord (million BTU) | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Osage-orange (hedge) | 30.7 – 32.9 | Throws sparks — stove wood, not open-hearth wood. |
| Shagbark hickory | 27.5 – 29.1 | Splits hard, and dealers know what it’s worth. |
| Black locust | 27.9 – 28.1 | A fight at the splitting block. |
| White oak | 27.0 – 29.1 | Needs the full year in the stack, sometimes more. |
| Honeylocust | 26.7 | Watch the thorns when you’re cutting it yourself. |
| Red oak | 24.6 – 25.3 | Slow to season, like all the oaks. |
The fine print that matters more than the ranking: those figures are for seasoned wood. A green cord of hickory heats worse than a dry cord of cottonwood, because a third of the fire's work goes into boiling water instead of warming the room. The full BTU chart has all the species and the seasoning arithmetic.
If it's for the fireplace: calm beats hot
An open fireplace changes the question. Most of the heat goes up the flue anyway, so BTUs stop being the point — what you want is a wood that behaves in front of an open room: low smoke, few sparks, a good flame, and a smell worth having in the house.
| Species | Sparks | Smoke | Fragrance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black cherry | Few | Low | Excellent |
| Apple | Few | Low | Excellent |
| Sugar maple (hard maple) | Few | Low | Good |
| White ash | Few | Low | Slight |
Black cherry is the quiet star here — middling heat, but low smoke, almost no sparks, coals that glow for hours, and the best fragrance on the chart. Apple is its orchard cousin, and a well-seasoned ash or hard maple gives a bright, steady flame.
The woods to keep away from an open hearth are the ones the tables mark "many" for sparks: osage-orange, mulberry, eastern redcedar, ponderosa pine and spruce. None of them are bad wood — osage-orange is the hottest thing on the chart — but they belong behind stove glass or a screen, not in front of the sofa.
Never burn these
Some of this list surprises people, so here it is plainly. EPA's Burn Wise guidance says to never burn:
- Pressure-treated, painted, or coated wood. Old deck boards, fence posts, pallets with unknown history — the treatment chemicals go into your room and your lungs.
- Plywood, particle board, or anything with glue in it. Same problem, different chemistry.
- Ocean driftwood. The salt burns into corrosive, toxic compounds.
- Wet, rotted, diseased, or moldy wood. It smolders instead of burning and sends the problem up the chimney or into the room.
- Household trash — cardboard, plastics, foam, glossy paper. A stove is not an incinerator.
And the everyday one: unseasoned anything. Green wood wastes a third of its heat boiling off water and paints your chimney with creosote — the tar that causes chimney fires. Whatever species you settle on, give it its months in the stack.
The real answer: dry, local, and legal
Pick the densest wood you can get cheaply, season it properly, and buy it close to where you'll burn it — hauling firewood more than about 50 miles is how tree-killing pests get to new forests. Compare everything else on the firewood BTU chart.
No wood is "best" on a day you can't legally light it. Burn bans are declared county by county — check your county's current status and confirm with the county line before you light.