Firewood Calculator

“How much wood is that” is a measurement problem before it’s a price problem

Firewood is sold by a unit — the cord — that almost nobody can visualize from the word alone, and worse, it’s sold informally enough that “cord,” “face cord,” “rick” and “truckload” all get used loosely by different sellers to mean different volumes. This calculator solves the actual problem: given a stack’s dimensions (something you can measure with a tape measure, whether you’re checking your own woodpile or a delivered load), what volume of wood is that, and is the seller’s price actually competitive.

The cord, precisely defined

A full cord is a specific, standardized volume: a stack 4 feet high, 4 feet deep, and 8 feet long, totaling 128 cubic feet. That figure includes the air gaps between split, irregularly shaped pieces of wood — the actual solid wood volume in a cord is closer to 85-90 cubic feet once you account for those gaps, which is part of why cords are measured by stacked volume rather than weighed or measured as solid wood. This calculator’s math starts from that same standardized 128-cubic-foot definition, so a stack you enter as 4 × 4 × 8 comes back as exactly one cord.

The unit that trips almost everyone up: the face cord

The single most common firewood confusion isn’t about the full cord — it’s the face cord, sometimes called a rick, which many sellers advertise as simply “a cord” without the qualifier. A face cord has the same 4-foot height and 8-foot length as a full cord, but its depth is only as long as a single split piece — typically 16 inches (1.33 feet) rather than the full 4 feet. That makes a face cord roughly a third the volume of a true cord. If a seller quotes a price per “cord” that seems unusually cheap compared to other quotes, ask explicitly for the stack depth — a face cord priced at “cord” rates is effectively a 3x markup once you correct for the actual volume, whether the seller is being deceptive or simply using regional terminology loosely. Enter your actual stack depth in this calculator (1.33 ft for a standard 16-inch face cord, 4 ft for a full cord) to get an honest volume regardless of what a seller calls it.

Estimating what you’ll actually burn in a season

How many cords a household burns in a heating season depends on climate severity, the home’s size and insulation, and critically, whether wood is a primary heat source or occasional supplemental use. A home using an efficient modern wood stove as primary heat in a cold Northern climate commonly burns 3 to 6 cords across a full winter; a household burning a fireplace a few evenings a month for ambiance might use well under a single cord. There’s no universal number here worth hard-coding — the honest approach is tracking your own actual consumption for one season and using that as the baseline for future planning, since your specific stove efficiency, house tightness and personal cold tolerance all move the real number more than any average would predict.

Seasoning: why a cheap “green” load isn’t actually cheap

Freshly cut wood can be roughly half water by weight, and every pound of that water has to boil off before the fire produces useful heat — meaning a meaningful share of green wood’s energy content is wasted just drying itself out as it burns, rather than heating your home. Green wood also burns cooler, produces more smoke, and deposits more creosote inside a chimney flue, which is a real chimney-fire risk over a season of use. Properly seasoned wood — split, stacked off the ground, covered on top but with open sides for airflow, for roughly 6-12 months depending on species and your local climate — burns hotter, cleaner and more efficiently, so a slightly higher price for genuinely seasoned wood is usually the better deal even before accounting for the chimney safety difference. See the energy cost calculator to compare wood heating against your utility’s rates, and the degree-days calculator to quantify how severe a given heating season actually is for your location.