South Jersey buyer's reference
What firewood
should cost
Firewood has no list price and we're not going to invent one. What's here is the thing that actually saves money: how to judge the quote you're given, what New Jersey legally owes you when you buy a cord, and how to tell whether you got one.
What you're legally owed
A cord is 128 cubic feet.
Everything else is a story.
New Jersey requires firewood to be advertised, offered and sold by the cord or a fraction of a cord, and nothing else. Not the yard sign, not the Facebook post, not the invoice. If a seller is using another word, that isn't a style choice.
The terms that aren't legal here
“Face cord.” “Rack.” “Pile.” “Truckload.” All prohibited in New Jersey, in the advertisement as much 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. It can be a third of a cord or half of one and you have no way to know which until it's in your driveway. A cord is a fixed volume you can measure with a tape.
The trap: loose volume isn't stacked volume
A cord is 128 cubic feet stacked and well stowed. The same wood thrown loose takes 30–40% more space. That gap is where most short loads come from — and most of the time nobody is lying, they're eyeballing a heaped truck bed and calling it a cord.
Stack it and measure it. Four feet high by eight feet long by four feet deep is a cord. Half that depth is a half cord. If it doesn't come out, you have a number to take back to the seller and a ticket with their name on it.
The ticket the seller owes you
New Jersey requires a delivery ticket on every non-packaged firewood sale. Plenty of small sellers around here don't provide one, and asking for it is the fastest way to tell a real operation from a guy with a truck.
- The seller's name and address
- The quantity, in cords or a fraction of a cord
- The price
- Any quality claim made in connection with the sale — including the word “seasoned”
- The date and a serial number
Committing to that in writing is one of the six things a seller signs to carry the Guarantee. The whole Guarantee →
| Size | Stacked | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Full cord | 128 cu ft | 4′ × 4′ × 8′ |
| Half cord | 64 cu ft | 4′ × 2′ × 8′ |
| Third cord | 42.7 cu ft | a mid-size pickup bed, level |
| Quarter cord | 32 cu ft | ~900 lb seasoned |
A full cord will not fit in a pickup. Seasoned hardwood runs 3,400–4,200 lb a cord; a half-ton is rated for 1,400–2,400 lb including you. The volume fits before the weight does, which is exactly how people end up overloaded on Route 70. More on that →
The method
Test the stack, not the stick
Nobody meters every piece of firewood they sell — it would take longer than splitting it. This is the method a Guaranteed seller signs up to, the one we audit against, and — more useful to you today — the one you can run yourself on a load in your own driveway.
- Pull from at least six places in the stack. Outside, middle, and low down. The outside dries first, so testing only what's easy to reach tells you what you want to hear rather than what's true.
- Split each one open. A meter on a weathered outside face reads the last dry week, not the wood. The pins go into the fresh inside face, across the grain, near the middle of the piece.
- Write down every reading. Not just the good ones, and with the date. A reading with no date is a story.
- The highest one is the number. If the worst piece is over 20%, that stack isn't seasoned — it's green wood, and it should be sold as green at the green price.
What a reading has to carry
- How many pieces were tested
- The full range, lowest to highest
- The highest reading, called out on its own
- The date it was taken, and who took it
Why the highest and not an average? An average hides the wet one, and the wet one is the piece that hisses, blackens your glass and makes you think you bought bad wood. A seller who quotes you their worst piece and it's still under 20% has told you something.
The going rate
What a cord costs, and why
we won't print a number
Firewood has no list price and never has. We're not going to invent one, and we're not going to quote a price on behalf of a business that never authorized us to. What we can do is show you how to judge the quote you're given — which is the thing that actually saves money, and which works on a seller who has never heard of us.
How buying works, and what we're not
- You take a number off the list. There is no form in front of it, no tracking number and nobody calling you back. The directory →
- You call them and ask the four questions. What does it meter, is it a full cord, do I get a ticket, and what happens if it doesn't burn right. What a good answer sounds like →
- You buy from them. They deliver, they take payment, and they give you the delivery ticket New Jersey requires with their name on it. We never touch the money.
- If something's wrong, tell us anyway. Even if you've sorted it with the seller. It's how the moisture column on that list eventually gets filled in. Tell us →
What we can enforce, and what we can't. Nobody on that list has signed anything with us yet, so today the honest answer is: nothing. A seller who signs the Guarantee commits 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. That's the whole mechanism. We can't fine anyone and we won't pretend we can.
Why you're not buying it from us. Because we never touched that wood. If we took your money for it we'd be the seller of record on a ticket somebody else writes, guaranteeing a moisture number we didn't measure. Plenty of middlemen do exactly that.
Why there's no number on this page
Because we'd have to make it up, or take it from somebody who never agreed to let us quote them. Neither is worth doing on a site whose whole product is being right about numbers.
- A national average is a rumor with a dollar sign. The ones you'll find are compiled from unnamed "proprietary databases" and they don't know what county you're in.
- A price copied off a seller's website goes stale silently. We wouldn't know when they changed it. You'd turn up quoting a number they never gave us, and they'd wear our mistake.
- There is no survey to cite. We looked: no Rutgers extension figure, no Department of Agriculture series, nothing from the DEP. New Jersey publishes the rules for selling firewood and no prices at all.
- What we will publish is a price a listed seller gives us and keeps current, with the date they gave it, on their own row. A number with somebody's name behind it. The directory →
Every other firewood site in the country will give you a range. We'd rather be the one that says it doesn't know yet.
How to judge a quote without a reference price
You don't actually need our number. You need three of theirs, forced onto the same footing — which almost nobody does, and which is where the money is.
- Get three quotes, all per full cord, all delivered to your address. Half the spread you'll see between sellers isn't price, it's one of them quoting a half cord or leaving delivery out.
- Ask what's included before you compare: how far delivery runs before it costs extra, whether stacking is extra, whether tax is on top.
- Seasoned, green and kiln-dried are three different products. Kiln-dried costs substantially more and green costs less — a cheap quote is often a quote for a different thing, not a better deal on the same thing.
- The cheapest number in the county is cheap for a reason, and in this trade the reason is usually water. Wood that isn't ready is genuinely worth less, which is fine — as long as that's what you're being sold and told.
- Then ask what it meters. The four questions →
Now go find some wood
Nineteen sellers, their own numbers, and the four questions worth asking before you agree to anything.