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Comparative Value of Fuel

A cord of wood is 128 cubic feet; the sticks are cut four feet long and piled four feet high, and in a pile eight feet long. Wood cut to stove length, eighteen to twenty inches, is sometimes sold as a cord, when only eight feet long, four feet high, and as wide as the sticks are long, but it is not, of course, really a cord. The fair way to sell fuel, however, would be by weight; and when weights are equal the wood containing the most hydrogen will produce the most heat. Thus, one hundred pounds of dry pine are worth more as fuel than the same number of pounds of dry oak. Wood can never be economically used in a green state, as it then contains about twenty-five per cent water, which must be evaporated, and all the heat required to evaporate this sap is wasted. We give below a table, in which shell-bark hickory is made the standard of comparison, rated at 100 in value and 1000 in weight, and the weights of other varieties show their comparative value, which may be readily estimated in dollars and cents. For instance, if hickory is worth $7.00 per cord, the proper value of white-oak would be $4.86, for as 100 (hickory) is to $6.00, so is .81 to the value of white-oak, $4.86.