Cord vs Face Cord: What You Are Actually Buying

Firewood is sold in a unit almost nobody can picture, and it gets worse from there. "Cord", "face cord", "rick" and "truckload" all get used loosely, and the difference between a cord and a face cord is roughly three times the wood.

If a price seems unusually good, this is usually why.

The full cord, precisely

A full cord is a specific, standardised volume: a stack 4 feet high by 4 feet deep by 8 feet long, totalling 128 cubic feet.

That figure includes the air gaps between split, irregular pieces. Actual solid wood in a cord is closer to 85 to 90 cubic feet, which is why the unit is defined by stacked volume rather than weight or solid content.

cubic feet = length × height × depth
cords      = cubic feet ÷ 128

The firewood calculator runs this from a tape measure, which works equally well on your own woodpile or on a load someone just dropped in the driveway.

What a face cord actually is

A face cord — also called a rick — keeps the 4-foot height and 8-foot length of a full cord, but its depth is only as long as a single piece of wood.

Standard firewood is cut to 16 inches, or 1.33 feet. So:

face cord = 4 × 8 × 1.33 = 42.7 cubic feet
          = about one third of a full cord

This is where money changes hands unfairly. A face cord priced at full-cord rates is effectively a 3x markup, whether the seller is being deceptive or simply using regional terminology loosely.

Always ask for the stack depth in inches. Not the unit name — the depth. It is the only question that resolves the ambiguity, and an honest seller will answer it without hesitation.

Checking a delivered load

Stack it and measure it. That is the whole method, and it takes five minutes.

Height times length times depth gives cubic feet; divide by 128 for cords. If you paid for a full cord and the stack measures 45 cubic feet, you received about a third of what you paid for.

Measure the depth at the shallowest point rather than the deepest — sellers sometimes deliver pieces cut to inconsistent lengths, and the short ones set the usable depth of the stack.

How much you will burn in a season

There is no universal figure worth trusting here, because the variables swamp any average: climate severity, stove or fireplace efficiency, house insulation, and whether wood is primary or supplemental heat.

A home using an efficient modern wood stove as its main heat source in a cold northern climate commonly burns three to six cords across a winter. A household lighting a fireplace a few evenings a month for atmosphere might use well under one.

The honest method is tracking your own consumption for a single season and using that as your baseline afterwards. To compare one winter's severity against another objectively, heating degree days is the metric — the degree days calculator converts temperature data into a number you can actually compare year to year.

Seasoned versus green, and why cheap green wood is not cheap

Freshly cut wood can be roughly half water by weight. Every pound of that water has to boil off before the fire produces useful heat, so a substantial share of green wood's energy content is spent drying itself out rather than warming your house.

Green wood also burns cooler, smokes more, and deposits more creosote in the flue — a genuine chimney fire risk across a season of use.

Properly seasoned wood is split, stacked off the ground, covered on top with open sides for airflow, and left for roughly six to twelve months depending on species and climate. A higher price for genuinely seasoned wood is usually the better deal before you even count the safety difference.

Check it by weight and sound: seasoned wood is noticeably lighter than it looks, has cracks radiating from the end grain, and two pieces knocked together ring rather than thud.

Species matters more than most sellers admit

A cord is a volume, not an energy content, and different woods differ substantially in how much heat that volume delivers.

Dense hardwoods — oak, hickory, hard maple, beech, ash — carry roughly twice the heat energy per cord of light softwoods like pine, spruce or poplar. Buying a cord of pine at hardwood prices is a worse deal than buying a face cord by mistake.

Softwoods are not useless. They light easily, burn hot and fast, and make good kindling and shoulder-season fuel. They also deposit more resin, so a flue burning mostly softwood wants more frequent inspection.

Oak deserves a specific warning: it is excellent firewood and it seasons slowly, often needing a full year or more rather than six months. Oak sold as seasoned after one summer usually is not.

When a seller advertises "mixed hardwood", ask which species. The answer tells you whether the price is fair, and a seller who cannot name what they are selling is telling you something too.

Stacking so it actually dries

Wood does not season in a heap. Air has to move through it.

The arrangement that works is simple: split the rounds first, since bark resists moisture escape and split faces do not. Stack off the ground on pallets or rails so the bottom row is not wicking soil moisture back up. Cover only the top, leaving the sides open, because a tarp wrapped around a stack traps moisture instead of shedding it.

Orient the stack so prevailing wind moves along the rows rather than into the end of them, and leave a hand's width between rows if you are building more than one.

A stack built this way in spring is genuinely ready by autumn for most species. A tarped heap dumped in a shady corner in spring will still be wet in November, and that is the wood that produces the smoky, disappointing fires people blame on their stove.

Comparing wood against other heat

Wood's economics depend entirely on local delivered cord prices against your other options, and the comparison is worth running rather than assuming.

The energy cost calculator handles electric and gas heating cost, and what a kilowatt-hour costs you explains how to pull your real rate off a utility bill. For propane-heated homes, the propane tank size calculator covers annual consumption, which is the figure to set against cords per season.

The EPA's Burn Wise programme covers efficient stove selection and safe burning practice, both of which change the cords-per-winter number more than the wood species does.