The moisture meter is a real handy tool for you to use when you’re burning a wood-burning product. First, it will tell us if we’re burning dry seasoned wood or not which will tell us if we’re going to get the optimum performance out of our product. It will also help keep your glass a lot cleaner if you’re burning dry, seasoned fuel.
So, your moisture meter from Travis Industries comes shipped in a nice little box inside of the wood stove. Remove the moisture meter from the box and install the 9-volt battery and then pull the cover off. The cover, covers up 2 little prongs. These 2 little prongs are what you stick on to the wood. You don’t have to jam it on there, you just press it into the wood. Hold down the button that says low moisture content and the meter will show you the moisture content for your fuel. Anything below a 20% moisture reading is really good, dry fuel. Anything higher than that is not what you want to burn.
The end reading of a piece of wood is going to give you a drier content than the center of the wood, because the center isn’t exposed to the air. So, what you need to do is split a dry piece of wood to test the center of the wood as well because the internal core moisture of that wood could be higher. By taking the moisture content of the core of the wood, it will give you a better, true reading.
The moisture meter has two buttons, one is low moisture content and one is a high moisture content. If you stick the meter into the piece of wood and press and hold the high moisture button and it is higher than 20% you don’t want to burn that piece of wood. How you use the moisture meter is if you press on the low button it will read up to 15% moisture content. If you are pressing the high button it goes all the way up to 35% and If it lights up at that number it means you have a higher fuel moisture content than you really want to be burning inside your wood stove. The high moisture button won’t read anything if the moisture content of the wood is less than 16%, so the high button will only read if the moisture is between 16 and 30%. The low button will read anywhere between 7 and 15%. Thank you for taking the time to learn about using your moisture meter and how it will benefit you!
