Highlights
- Your best option for packaging your firewood is recyclable, UV-resistant firewood mesh bags. They allow the wood to dry, are easy to carry, look professional, and will last months outside.
- While traditional hand-bagging can work for small amounts of wood, investing in a firewood bagger can help you save time, sweat less, and make more money. You can get a loading tray or a firewood bagger, and if you don’t want to spend money, even make one yourself with a trashcan!
- Bagging firewood has many advantages over bundling with plastic wrap or straps. Yet, everything comes down to how much wood you’re processing and how big of an investment you want to make
Why Bag Your Firewood?
In the great white north, summers are for camping and hobby campfires. As such, both roadside stands and mass firewood producers play a crucial role in supplying ready-to-use firewood at an affordable price at retail locations everywhere.
And while there are a variety of ways to make it convenient for customers to carry your firewood, we’ve found that customers and retailers alike prefer mesh firewood bags. Why? A few simple reasons.
Why Mesh Bags are Ideal
Even if you sell wood on a larger scale, making sure your firewood is convenient and easy to transport will save you time and effort, and can drastically improve your sales. This is where firewood mesh bags come in.
Compared to plastic wrap or vinyl straps, good poly mesh firewood bags will resist UV degradation (for months at a time), dry out quickly, are easy to carry, and some can even be recycled.
Whether you own a roadside stand or you’re a wholesale vendor, ensure you get high-quality UV-resistant bags that won’t degrade quickly. A reputable bag company in Canada, like St. Boniface, can help.
Bagging Firewood By Hand
Bagging firewood, or bundling firewood in general, can be a real chore.
Of course, the goal is that your efforts pay off with a high-priced, superior firewood bag sold at retail prices – dramatically higher than bulk firewood sold by the cord.
At St. Boniface Bag Company, we carry a range of poly mesh bag sizes for firewood specifically, our goal being to provide a bag that will fit your preferred firewood length and size.
Bagging firewood by hand is as simple as stuffing it in, shooting for a stuffed bag, number of pieces, or weight that you’ve decided is your goal.
There are other ways, however.
Better Approaches To Firewood Bagging
There are a few ways to semi-automate the bagging process and make your life a little easier. Once you get to a certain size and volume of bags, incorporating simple machinery into your process can save you time and make you more money in the long run.
Loading trays for Firewood Bagging
One of the main ways in which many of our wood sellers try to streamline their bagging process is with loading trays.
Usually not that expensive, loading trays come in many forms. The most widespread is a tilt tray, which consists of a long tray that sits on a metal stand or tabletop. You insert the open end of the tray into the bag, stack your logs on the tray neatly, then slide them into the bag and repeat.
While they don’t cut the need for manual labor, tilt trays will save you a lot of time and effort. They allow you to easily control how much wood goes into each bag and also make it easy for you to standardize the weight of your bundles.
Get a Firewood Bagger
Firewood bagging stations tend to be bigger and more automated than tilt trays. In their simplest form, they come with a metal stand on top of which sits a hollow barrel on a hinge. You fill the barrel with wood while it’s lying horizontally, insert one of the ends into the bag, then use the hinge and let gravity do the work.
More complex models exist, which can allow you to output hundreds of firewood bags per hour. They often include electrical machinery with either a rotating buffer space that pushes the billets into the bags, or even bigger systems that use elevators or rolling pins. You’ll only be looking at a firewood bagger if you need to bag tons of wood though, as they can be highly expensive.
Homemade Firewood Bagging Station
If you don’t want to spend money on any of the aforementioned models, then you can make a simpler version using a standard 13-gallon plastic trashcan!
Just cut the bottom off and insert it into your bags. Then fill it up with logs, and lift it out. This is a quick and easy way to make tidy bundles, even if it’s not as efficient as a tray or doesn’t have as much capacity as a firewood bagger.
Bundling Vs. Bagging Firewood
Another traditional way of presenting firewood is in simple bundles, either strapped with a rope or wrapped together.
The main advantage of bundling firewood is that it is super cheap. Whether you do it with plastic wrap or rope, the extra cost of each bundle will be negligible compared to buying a firewood bagger. However, it’s a lot less appealing to the eye, and often less convenient for your customers.
Additionally, plastic wrap will soften and even break after long exposure to sunlight. Bundles like these are also harder to carry, as they don’t have a handle or straps.
That’s why firewood mesh bags are your best bet in most cases. If you sell lots of wood, they’re particularly accessible and easier to manage. Their main advantage isn’t just the professional presentation: they’ll allow you to standardize your bundle size, produce more wood, and maximize your profits.
One thing that’s not commonly mentioned is that mesh bags allow for ventilation, whereas plastic wrap does not. According to a study by Aston University in the UK, firewood can take over a year to dry. This means that if you plan on bagging your firewood before it’s fully cured, leaving your firewood out in the open, bags are your best option. They’re also sturdier, which means if you plan on producing your firewood ahead of time, they’ll resist longer exposure to the elements.
St. Boniface Bag’s Firewood Mesh Bags
If by now you’re thinking that bagging is ideal for you, check out our recyclable mesh bags. We offer sizes ranging from 19×32″ to 24×36″, all with months of UV protection.
Whether you need a few hundred or are ready to order wholesale bags, we ship quickly to your doorstep anywhere in Canada and the U.S.
