Units, and why they matter
Firewood is sold by volume, and the volume you should care about is the loose cubic metre – wood as it lands, air gaps and all. Everything we sell is priced that way, and every size is published:
| What it is | Volume | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Net bag | 0.03m³ | a carry-home bag, one evening |
| Barrow bag | 0.275m³ | one wheelbarrow |
| Ton bag | 1.1m³ | the standard bulk bag, craned off |
| Half transit | 2.2m³ | half a van, tipped loose |
| Full transit | 4.4m³ | a full van, tipped loose |
Be careful with anyone selling by “load”, “truckload” or “builder’s bag” without a number attached. Those words mean whatever the seller wants them to mean. A cubic metre is a cubic metre.
Work out your winter
Three questions. It works from what your fire actually is and how you actually use it, rather than from an average that fits nobody.
1What you burn on
2Roughly how big is the room
3How often, through the winter
For the season
2.7m³of firewood
A modern 5kW stove lit four or five evenings a week gets through about 2.7 cubic metres in a 26-week Dorset winter. That is a half transit and a ton bag of seasoned mixed, or a full transit if you would rather have some left over.
An older stove needs roughly a fifth more. An open fire needs more than double, because most of its heat goes up the chimney.
From the heat output of your appliance over a five-hour evening, at 4.1 kilowatt hours per kilo of dry hardwood, across a normal Dorset season of about 26 weeks. It is an estimate, not a promise – a cold January burns more than a mild one.
What typical households use
For a sense check, here is what people in Bournemouth and Poole actually order in a season.
| Household | Per winter | Usually buys |
|---|---|---|
| Weekend fire, modern stove | 1–1.5m³ | a ton bag, sometimes two |
| Most evenings, 5kW stove | 3–4m³ | a full transit |
| Every evening, large stove | 5–7m³ | a full transit plus a half |
| Open fire, used regularly | 6–9m³ | two full transits |
| Stove as the main heating | 7–10m³ | two full transits, split over the season |
The single biggest variable is not the stove, it is whether it is a stove or an open fire. An open fire sends most of its heat up the chimney and gets through roughly twice the wood for the same warmth in the room.
Buying it in one go
A full transit is 4.4m³ at £420 in seasoned mixed. That is £95/m³. The same wood in ton bags is £109/m³, and in net bags £400. You are not buying better wood in the small bags – you are buying handling and packaging.
22% cheaper per cubic metre to take a full transit of kiln dried rather than four ton bags of the identical logs. If you have somewhere dry, buying big once is the single easiest saving in firewood.
The catch is that a full transit arrives tipped loose. It is a heap on your drive, and moving 4.4 cubic metres of logs into a store is a genuine afternoon’s work. A ton bag, by contrast, is craned off and set down wherever you point.
Every load size, what it looks like when it lands, and the price per cubic metre.
Can you actually store it?
This is the question that should decide the order, and it is the one people skip. Dry wood delivered in October can be wet wood by January if it sits on bare ground under a tarp.
- Off the ground – pallets, gravel, anything. Ground moisture wicks straight up into the bottom layer.
- Covered on top, open at the sides – a stack needs air moving through it. A tarp wrapped all the way round traps moisture and grows mould.
- Somewhere you will actually walk to in the rain in February. The wood store at the bottom of the garden gets used far less than the one by the back door.
If you have no dry space at all, buy ton bags rather than a tipped load – the bag itself keeps the worst off, and you can take one at a time. It costs more per cubic metre, and it is still the right call if the alternative is a soaking heap.
There is a fuller guide to this: how to store firewood so it stays dry.