What is actually fixed, and what is not
For pellets, moisture is a classified property with a specification behind it and a certification scheme checking it. For split logs sold by the crate, pallet or cubic metre, there is no equivalent in general use on the consumer market this site surveys.
What there is instead is vocabulary. German listings describe firewood as kiln-dried, chamber-dried, air-dried, oven-ready or fresh, and each of those words describes a process rather than a measured state. Some sellers publish a figure; most publish an adjective.
So the honest position is the one this site takes everywhere: where a seller publishes a moisture figure, the page prints it and names the seller as its source. Where a seller publishes a process word, the page prints the word and says it is a word. It does not convert one into the other.
What none of it promises
A process word does not undertake a state on the day the wood reaches you. Kiln-dried wood stored uncovered through a wet autumn is not what the kiln produced.
Nothing in a listing accounts for your stack. Whether wood carries on drying or starts taking moisture back depends on how it is stacked, what is over it and what air reaches it — which is why the rack, the cover and the basket families exist on this site at all.
And no appliance recovers what a damp log takes away. A wet log spends the first part of every burn boiling water out of itself, and the heat for that comes out of the room. That is not a manufacturer’s failing and no appliance standard addresses it.
The documents that sit beside it
The appliance standards all specify the fuel a test was run on, which is exactly why this property matters: an appliance fed wet wood is outside the conditions its own figures were taken under, and its declared efficiency describes an appliance that is not the one in your room.
The measuring instrument that settles the question is served by a sister site rather than this one, which is a scope decision and not an accident: this site reports what makers publish about fuel, and points at the instrument without ranking instruments.
Where it appears on this site
On the firewood, kindling and briquette families, and on every appliance family, because the first section of this site’s method page is about the fuel rather than the appliance.
It is also the clearest case on the site of a page ending by telling you to buy nothing. Splitting next winter’s wood this spring costs an afternoon and changes more than any purchase on these pages.
Questions that keep arriving by post
Why does this site not just tell me a target moisture figure?
Because that number would be ours rather than a maker’s, and the whole method rests on not doing that. Where an appliance manufacturer states what its appliance was designed and tested for, the page prints that statement and names the maker.
Is kiln-dried wood worth the extra?
It is a process, and the question is what state the wood is in when it reaches you rather than what happened to it in a factory. Where a seller publishes a figure alongside the process word, that figure is what the page prints. Where it publishes only the word, the page says so.
Can I dry wood faster indoors?
Bringing a day’s wood inside ahead of burning is ordinary practice; storing a winter’s worth indoors is a different proposition and brings its own problems. This site reports what racks, covers and baskets are built to do, and leaves the practice to the documentation.
Last reviewed 22 September 2026