 It's a beautiful February day. So I'm out here cutting wood with a hand saw. And my goal is to compare the caloric energy it takes to cut by hand versus what it takes to cut with a chainsaw. So I'll be out here for an hour, cutting up as much as I can. Each one that I cut, I'm gonna measure the diameter. So at the end of the hour, I'll know about how many diameter inches I've cut and how many calories have burned. I've got a heart monitor on. I'm recording how many beats I have, which equates to calories I've burned. And then I'll crunch all the numbers once I'm all done, doing both the hand saw and the chainsaw. And we'll compare them. We'll also compare them with splitting these, both by hand with an X and using a mechanical splitter. So we're gonna see what's the caloric and energetic and hour wise difference between splitting firewood by hand and doing it with power tools. Cutting it, once splitting it and once burning it. And that's certainly true today. I wanna get two warm clothes before I start sweating and then I get cold. Not quite two dozen logs cut up today in an hour. So I'm gonna stop my recording of the heart rate. So my average heartbeat was 110 beats per minute. That was an hour and 11 minutes. And I burned 614 calories cutting up this much wood, which I'll quantify by figuring out the area that I cut for each one of these logs. And then I can compare that to the area I cut with the chainsaw later, using the same methods. So there's one day, I'll probably do a couple more days like this so I get a good average over more logs than just this. Well it's obviously a lot nicer now, it's March. And I'm going to finish this up with the chainsaw. I've cut my couple hours worth of wood with a handsaw. And now I'm switching over to the chainsaw and I'll do a couple hours and that'll probably be the end of it. But then I'll be able to compare killer calories, gasoline to the volume of wood cut because I've been recording each log that I've cut. So I have an overall area that I've sawed through with each method so I can compare these things in both work and time. Let's break out the power tools. We split it and the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to go for an hour with my heart rate monitor on. I'll split up as much wood as I can and then I'll stack it. And when I stack it, I'll measure the height and the width, everything's 16 feet wide. So the height and the length of the pile will tell me about how much wood I've split. And then I'll do the same thing with a wood splitter. And I will measure the height and the width of that and then I can compare how much energy it takes me to split a quart of wood versus the energy it takes me to run a wood splitter to split a quart of wood. I can also compare time and other things. So without further ado, I'm going to get splitting. So this will probably end up using the mall as well as the ax a bit, but we'll see how it goes. If you're interested, I use a mall with wedges for the larger difficult things. And then I use a splitting ax which is a lot lighter than a mall. Malls are perfectly fine. I like an ax. I actually have a video on how to use a splitting ax in another part of the low tech YouTube channel. So you can check that out. I'll link to it here. Okay, now to get the square footage, I'm going to measure the height, which here is two feet. And then I'm going to measure the distance here which is four and a half feet because it's a trapezoid. And the trapezoids are, I mean, I could measure this, the top and the bottom and take an average or I can just, the angles are fine. Six is four and a half feet is the average. So four and a half times two is nine square feet here. Now I'll pop over to this one. So I've got nine square feet over there. And here I've got two and a half by, two and a half by five and a half. So that's 11, 12, 13, 14 plus nine. So that is a 23 square feet in an hour and about 650 calories. So there we go. The video showed us me with my neighbors. I called them the Grumpy Old Man Tree Service. It's my two retired neighbors. They do this all the time on neighbor's properties. So they were helping me out. We were three for about 20 minutes and then just the two of us would last. So I'm going to have to factor that in when I do my calorie count because it was actually two people, although I was doing the brunt of the work for the last 40 minutes. So we'll see how that is reflected in the heart data. Okay, so in an hour and seven minutes, I burned 504, nevermind the rooster, I burned 514 calories and we were able to split all this wood, which works out to be about seven by three, 21. So I call that 10 square feet, four by eight, 16, so 26 square feet. So we'll now go run the numbers and see how that compares to chopping them by hand. Although I do have to split these by hand, we burn a gallon of gas. So that's one gallon of gas, one hour, 514 calories for me. So over two months, I cut and split two thirds of a quart of wood and a quart of wood just measures four feet by four feet by eight feet. It's a standard measurement that people use to describe firewood. And for the manual sawing, I used a one and a half man saw that cost me about $50. And for splitting, I used a Fiskars splitting axe, which was about 70. I also borrowed my neighbor's Poulon Perot PR4016 chainsaw, which cost about $169. And a Spico 25 ton splitter, which cost about $1,000. Thanks to both my neighbor Keith for lending me those tools and Phil for helping me run the splitter. If you want to see all the data I collected, you can go to our website, lowtechinstitute.org, and under the research tab, you can click on lowtech R&D, and there you'll find this and other projects I've done and all the data that I've collected so far. So you can really dig down in this a little deeper than I'm going to here. So our first consideration is time. For many of us, time is the most pressing limit on what we can get done. And in this test, the results are absolutely clear. The chainsaw is by far more efficient than a hand saw. It's about five times as fast. To cut up an entire cord of wood, it would have taken me 25 hours with the saw, but only five and a half hours with the chainsaw. With splitting wood, there was also a clear winner, but it wasn't the one I expected. I expected the splitter to be a lot faster. But in fact, to split an entire cord of wood, it would have taken five and a half hours. And that's because we could do it with two men in half that time. But because we're using two people, it doubles the time. It actually would only take me four and a half hours to split it with an axe. This was a surprise to me, but actually it turns out most of the time is spent moving wood around, not actually splitting. Splitting is actually pretty quick. Another consideration is cost. And again, here was there was a clear winner. The manual methods were by far cheaper. My saw, again, only cost $50, my axe 70. And so the lifetime costs of these are very cheap because they don't really cost anything to run them. The saw needs a sharpening kit that costs about $50. So $100 for the saw, $70 for the axe, it costs nothing to run them over their lifetime, which could be 20 or 30 years. But then the power tools cost quite a lot more. The chainsaw itself is only $170. But then you have to consider the gas, the sharpening kit, the extra chain and the oil for the lubricating oil for the chain itself. It actually adds up to over $660 for a decade of use, out of which you're only gonna get about 500 hours of life, which means you could cut up about 90 cords of wood. In the splitting category, it's even more of a blowout. The, as I said, the axe costs $70. The splitter itself costs over $1,000, plus the gallon of gas for every hour you use it. So these costs add up. And if you split it out on a per cord level, saying, let's take for example, you cut nine cords a year for a decade, that would cost you $7.37 a cord to cut with a chainsaw, but only 37 cents with a used handsaw. But it would take you five times as long. With the splitting, it would cost about 73 cents a cord to split it with an axe, plus your time, of course, but it would cost $17.42 to split it with a splitter. So you're paying a lot more to split things more slowly, but save yourself a little bit of energy, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But with the hand cutting, that's a lot of time and might very well be worth it to get the chainsaw unless you really enjoy using the manual saw, or have two people, maybe a two-man saw might be more efficient. I've used them before and it was a lot easier than the one and a half-man saw. Now we could also look at labor. And to measure labor, we use killer calories, basically food calories, calories, how much energy it takes to raise a pound of water one degree, and we're looking at how many of those I burned while doing these different activities. And we measured that using a heart monitor, which is able to more accurately convert how much energy I'm actually burning by measuring my heartbeat. And so what we were able to find was that operating a chainsaw to split up a cord of wood for that five hours would have only burned 1500 calories. But if I were to hand saw out a cord of wood, which would have taken me 25 hours, I would have burned almost 13,000 calories. There's a huge difference there in terms of how much energy I'm expending. So again, the chainsaw probably does win out for cutting up logs. But then if we turn to the splitting, it's a different story. It only took me 2,700 calories, or would take only 2,700 calories to split an entire cord of wood, which is pretty efficient when you look at the comparison with the wood splitter, it would have taken me only 1,800 calories. And you say, well, 2,700 is a lot more than 1,800. But if you think about it, it isn't. It's only 1,000 calories different to split an entire cord of wood. This is the same as a 20-mile bike ride. Yeah, it's work, but it's not a crazy difference for the cost and the time, because it's actually, again, quicker to split it with an axe. And this, of course, all assumes that you are an able-bodied person with a healthy heart, that sort of thing. If you have a bad ticker, you definitely want to use power tools when you can to reduce that stress on your body. But if you're able-bodied, or you like a quiet or working environment, by far, hands down, the hand tools are more pleasant. I'm particularly interested in emissions and energy for two reasons. First, people often debate how sustainable is a wood stove? Second, as we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, burning less fuel and doing things more efficiently is increasingly important. So we'll take the EPA standard of 8.9 kilograms of carbon dioxide per gallon of gasoline burned for this comparison. It's also important to remember that large amounts of other gases, in particular matter, are released in this two-stroke chainsaw engine, which makes it actually worse than what I'm gonna say it is. I wasn't able to find good numbers on this, but they can emit up to 300 times more greenhouse gases when burning fuel than a clean four-stroke engine. So even without going into these significant emissions, let's look at the carbon alone. To cut up a quart of wood, a chainsaw will emit about 4.6 kilograms of carbon plus plenty of much worse stuff. That's about the same amount as a power plant emits to create seven kilowatt hours, which is about a third of what a house needs in a day. Blitter's gonna burn through about 2.3 gallons, emitting about 20 kilograms of carbon to split that quart of wood, which is the equivalent of about two-thirds of what a house needs. So all together, using a chainsaw and a splitter, you're emitting the same amount as the energy used to power a house for an entire day. And that doesn't even begin to take into account the significant amount of emissions from the manufacturing process. I haven't been able to find real hard data on the carbon footprint of a chainsaw and a splitter, but a computer takes about 200 to 800 kilograms of carbon emissions to produce and a car is about six. So a wood splitter might be about one or two tons of carbon emitted to produce them. So there's that on top of the use carbon emissions. The song the ax don't emit any carbon. And you might say, well, aren't you breathing? Doesn't that create carbon dioxide? And yes it does, but that's a different type of carbon dioxide. When we breathe and exchange air with the atmosphere, that's carbon that's already in the atmosphere. We're not adding carbon, we're just changing its form. And the same thing goes with burning wood. This is wood that pulled carbon out of the air and created in the ground and created wood. Now when I'm burning it, it's going back into the atmosphere. That's not new carbon. That's priced into the carbon we have in the atmosphere. But when I burn fossil fuels, when I burn fuel oil or natural gas to heat my house, that's carbon that wasn't in the atmosphere that was in the ground that I'm now burning and putting into the atmosphere. So that's the difference. That's why an efficient stove, and this one is very efficient, burning sustainably harvested wood is actually not adding to carbon emissions, really. If that tree fell in the wood and rotted, most of that carbon would go back into the atmosphere anyway. So we're just oxidizing it here very quickly and releasing it soon. That's the only difference. It's gonna go back into the carbon cycle that it was pulled out of. So that is why I would argue that an efficient wood stove from sustainably harvested wood, and these were all dead trees that were taken off of neighbor's property. They often fall in farmer's fields and they need to be cleared. So it's deadfall wood. This is not, we're not cutting down fresh version for us to do this. This is all deadfall. I would argue an efficient and a sustainable way to heat our home. There was a lively discussion on social media about this when I posted about it earlier, and somebody brought up the fact that if I'm burning calories to do this stuff, then I'm burning food calories, which are more expensive to produce than gas calories. And that's absolutely true. To produce a gallon of gas, you only have to burn a gallon of gas. But to produce a kilo calorie of food, you have to burn 10 kilocalories of fossil fuels to produce that calorie, which is kind of insane. That's if you buy your food at the grocery store. This last year, I happened to grow two thirds of our food. So my kilocalories have much less carbon footprint than a standard one, but let's not worry about that. We'll just take the standard value of food you buy at the grocery store. So for example, when I burn 13,000 calories to cut an entire quart of wood by hand, that really means 129,000 kilocalories of fossil fuels were burned to create those food calories for me to eat to power the saw. So it's even more of a blowout using, if you go that far down the rabbit hole here. And this just further exacerbates the splitting blowout too, because those 2,700 food calories that I burned splitting up a quart of wood is only 27,000 kilocalories of fossil fuels used to produce that food. But if we add on the food calories to the fossil fuel calories for the splitter, that's approaching 100,000 kilocalories to split a quart of wood. So what's our takeaway? The handsaw is cheaper in cost and energy, but the chainsaw was faster and less work. We can also look at how the ax is cheaper, more efficient, but does take more calories. So in the end, the decision of how you split up your wood comes down to what counts most for you. Time, money, or the environment. If time is your guiding factor, then bucking logs with a chainsaw and splitting with an ax is probably the way to go. If money's your load star, then by all means do everything by hand. It is significantly cheaper. This holds true for the environment as well. Unless you consider the fossil fuels used in the production of your food, doing everything by hand is more environmentally friendly. It is a lot of calories to use that handsaw for such a long time. But in all cases, splitting with an ax or a mall is more efficient in times and cost, and it's only a little less efficient in calories. And frankly, who among us couldn't stand to lose a few pounds, right? If a chainsaw company wants to send me an electric chainsaw to throw into this mix, I'll absolutely do it, it can drop me a line. But there's a lot of carbon costs up front with an electric chainsaw. So that necessarily, that's not gonna change a lot of this. Thanks for watching, like and subscribe so that you can get other low-tech R&D videos when they come out. Check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org. You can also find us on all the different social media, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. Check us out there, and thanks for watching.