Firewood Bundling and Stretch Wrap

Whether you bundle firewood for sale for for your own personal use, stretch wrap is the most preferred way to bundle your material. Choosing the right wrap is very subjective and there are many options, but the information below should help you determine what will work best for you. 

What size stretch wrap do I need?

• Bundling Film
  This is narrow width stretch wrap that comes in widths of 2", 3" and 5". Bundling film is a good choice when you want to keep your firewood vented. It allows you to wrap just the ends, or both ends and the middle, and reduce the possibility of moisture becoming trapped in the wrap.
• Hand Wrap
  This is a wider wrap that comes in stock widths of 12", 15" and 18". With the extra width, this can allow for a quicker wrap time and will fit many firewood bundling machines and devices. All of our hand wrap comes on a standard 3" core.

What gauge stretch wrap should I use?

Ultimately, this is a very subjective question, but there are some guidelines that can be used. The typical application for stretch film is holding together boxes of product on a skid weighing typically over 1000lbs, so the wrap has to be able to stretch tightly to hold the load together during the shipping and handling processes. That is not the case with firewood bundling, where the bundles are small, typically moved by hand, and weigh only a few dozen pounds at most.

For these reasons, we recommend our Extreme 789 hand wrap. This hand wrap is thinner and less expensive than a traditional 80-90ga film, but has comparable strength when it comes to holding your bundles together. It has the cling you expect with a standard gauge stretch wrap and will resist the minimal puncture potential presented by firewood.

What are the best tools to use to wrap the firewood?

For bundling film we have three handle options:

• Handy Bundler
  This is the most common type. The film comes on a 3" core and each case has one plastic plug-in handle. This is a good choice if you have one person doing the wrapping, and they do it sporadically.
• Best Bundler/Extended Core
  This film comes on a 1" extended core and is available only in 5" widths. The 5" of film is wound on a 10" long core, leaving a 5" long handle built-in to each roll. Our Best Bundler ships with one red rubber grip per case, which you can use to slip over the core and reduce any wear on unprotected hands. This is a good choice if you have multiple people doing the wrapping and the wrapping is done fairly often throughout the day.
• QuikWrap
  For heavy use, applications, where more than one person is doing the wrapping and they are doing it for the majority of the day, our patented QuikWrap system is the perfect choice. It is available in all widths (2", 3" and 5") and comes on a 1-3/4" core. Each case comes with one QuikWrap handle. The handle plugs in to the core and has a built-in black, rubber grip that rotates around a fixed core, allowing you to use the wrap without the need to wear gloves or worry about the handle popping out of the core. It also give you the ability to apply tension to the wrap by tightening your grip on the handle.

With hand wrap, there are a couple of options. 

One is our Eliminator bundler. The Eliminator allows you to easily wrap bundles as large as 24" x 24" x 24" and up to 70lbs and it supports stretch wrap between 10-15" wide.

Another option is the Little Nelson Bundling Film Dispenser, which works on 3" core bundling film between 2" and 6" wide. It is a heavy-duty, ergonomic alternative to the plug-in handles that come with most bundling film. It features a built-in braking mechanism which allows you greater control over how much stretch you want to apply and where.

Please contact us with any questions you may have and if you'd like to try samples of our Extreme 789 hand wrap, available in widths of 12", 15" and 18" or any of our other hand wraps or bundling films.