Straight answers

128 cubic feet of wood, stacked tight and neat — the classic picture is a stack 4 feet high, 4 feet deep and 8 feet long. That's the legal definition in New Jersey and it's not negotiable.

The thing to watch: wood thrown loose into a truck bed occupies roughly 30 to 40% more space than the same wood stacked. That gap is where most short loads come from. If a seller shows you a heaped pickup bed and calls it a cord, it is almost certainly not one — a standard pickup bed heaped can't hold a full cord of hardwood without exceeding what the truck is rated to carry.

Because New Jersey doesn't allow it. State weights and measures rules require firewood to be advertised, offered and sold using the term “cord” and fractional parts of a cord, and they specifically prohibit “face cord,” “rack,” “pile,” “truckload” and anything of similar meaning — in the advertisement as well as at the sale.

There's a good reason for the rule. A “face cord” is 4 feet by 8 feet by whatever depth the seller feels like, which means it can be a third of a cord or half of one and you have no way to know which. A quarter cord is 32 cubic feet, a half is 64, a full cord is 128. You can measure every one of them with a tape.

Rough planning numbers, and they vary a lot by house and habits:

Occasional fireplace fires, weekends only: a quarter to a half cord gets most people through a season.
Fireplace or stove a few nights a week: a half to one cord.
Wood stove as a real heat source all winter: three to five cords, and start buying in spring.
Fire pit, spring through fall: a quarter cord or a case of bundles.

Open fireplaces eat wood and return very little heat to the room. An efficient modern stove will get two to three times the useful heat out of the same cord.

No — and this is the single most misunderstood thing about buying firewood, so it's worth getting right before you drive over.

Seasoned mixed hardwood runs roughly 3,400–4,200 lb per cord. A modern half-ton pickup is rated for somewhere between 1,400 and 2,400 lb of payload, and that figure includes you and everything else in the truck. So a full cord is around double what any half-ton can legally carry, and a half cord (1,700–2,100 lb) is over the limit for most of them.

Here's the trap: the volume fits before the weight does. A 6.5-foot bed loaded level with the rails is almost exactly a half cord by volume. It looks fine. It's overloaded. Anyone who tells you "it fits, so it's fine" is going by the wrong number.

Mid-size trucks — Ranger, Tacoma, Colorado — hit the wall on volume first. A 2026 Ranger's five-foot bed holds 43.5 cubic feet level with the rails. A quarter cord is 32 of those, so it fits with room to spare. A half cord is 64 and simply will not go in, whatever the payload sticker says.

For pickup, a quarter cord fits comfortably in anything — about 900 lb, and inside every rating on the market. Beyond that, take a trailer and know what it's rated for, or have the seller deliver it.

Cord weights from University of Maryland Extension FS-926; payload figures from current manufacturer specifications.

That's between you and the seller — we're not in the middle of it. Most sellers around here run a few days to a week in the off season and considerably longer once it turns cold. Ask them for their lead time on the first call; it's one of the things worth knowing before you agree to anything.

October through January is the crush everywhere. If you know you'll need wood, ask in late summer: there's no quality penalty for buying early and a real supply one for buying late. February is when this market breaks, and it's also when the moisture readings on this site are worth the most.

The fire kits are ours, but they aren't shipping yet — they get packed when enough people say they'd buy one. What's in them.

Because you can't referee a game you're playing. We ask sellers to let us walk onto their yard unannounced, split their wood open, and publish whatever the meter says. Nobody grants a competitor that.

We planned to sell wood too, and dropped it. It removed the objection every supplier would have raised, and it removed any reason for us to shade a reading in our own favor. The money is in checking wood, not hauling it — and a truck would only have made us a slightly larger version of every other firewood seller in the county.

For firewood, you pay the seller. Directly, on their terms, at their price. We never touch the money, take a deposit, or add a markup — we're paid a flat referral fee by them. You'll know exactly who you're buying from before you commit, and your delivery ticket comes from them with their name on it, as the state requires.

If a page ever asks you to pay South Jersey Firewood for a cord, it isn't us.

Fire kits and splitting are ours. Card or Venmo, and we send a payment link once we've confirmed stock or a date.

Ask your seller — they're the one collecting it, and they'll know how they treat it. We're not a party to your firewood purchase, so we're not the right people to answer for it. On the fire kits we ship, tax is shown separately if it applies.

That's between you and the seller, and most of them will — usually for something off the price. Ask when you call; we don't speak for anyone on the list.

Take a tape measure and stack it before you drive off. A cord is 128 cubic feet stacked, and loose wood takes 30–40% more room than the same wood stacked, which is where most short loads come from.

Whatever the seller has ready — around here that's usually mixed hardwood: oak, ash, maple and cherry. We don't sell it, so we can't tell you what's on any particular truck. What we can tell you is the rule: if a seller makes a species claim, New Jersey requires it to be accurate within 10% and to appear on your delivery ticket.

Want an all-oak or all-cherry load? That usually costs more and depends on what's genuinely dry that season. Ask for the species to go on the delivery ticket — a seller who'll write it down is telling you something a seller who only says it isn't.

You don't, from the word alone — and that's the whole problem. “Seasoned” is not a regulated term. Nobody has to test anything to print it on a sign. When the University of Tennessee metered bagged firewood sold as seasoned, the average came back near 66% moisture and not one sample met the standard.

So the plan is to publish numbers instead of adjectives — up to three per seller, each labeled with who took it: the seller's own dated reading, ours from the last time we walked their yard unannounced, and whatever buyers with meters have reported. Three readings that disagree tell you more than one that doesn't.

None of those exist yet. Nobody on the list has signed anything with us, put a number in writing, or let us onto their yard, and every cell in that column is empty. Being on our list tells you a business advertises firewood in this area. It does not tell you anything about their wood, and we're not going to imply otherwise until somebody signs.

And check it yourself. A pin meter is about $38, which is the single best purchase anyone who burns wood can make. Split a piece, press the pins into the fresh inside face. Under 20% is the number.

Depends on the seller. Most wood sold around here is air-seasoned rather than kiln dried, and a few sellers do run kilns — where they do, the reading we publish is the reading we took, and kiln-dried wood reads lower.

If someone sells you “kiln dried” or “USDA certified heat treated” wood out of a pickup truck, ask to see the treatment certificate. That certification requires a compliance agreement with USDA and paperwork for every load.

Locally, yes. Far away, please don't. All 21 New Jersey counties are inside the spotted lanternfly quarantine zone, and firewood is one of the main ways destructive insects spread — emerald ash borer has killed something like 24 million ash trees in this state. New Jersey asks that firewood be burned within 50 miles of where it was cut.

Many campgrounds, especially federal sites, require certified heat-treated wood only and will turn yours away at the gate. Check the campground's rule first, and when in doubt buy it there.

Take it up with the seller first. They sold it to you, they took your money, and they're the only ones who can fix it. Being on our list does not mean a seller has promised us anything — nobody has signed the Guarantee yet, and until somebody does, the honest answer about what we can enforce is: nothing.

Then tell us either way. Even if you've already sorted it. A report is how the empty moisture column on that list starts filling in, and it's how we know which yards are worth walking first.

When a seller does sign the Guarantee, this answer changes: they commit to making a bad load right within seven days, and if they don't, we publish that on their row with the date and it stays there a year.