Splitting firewood, is bigger better?

Hi all, for the first 48 years of my life, I have lived with a traditional wood-burning stove.
All of them were metal box stoves of different makes.
When getting firewood for these stoves, I looked for the tallest, largest-diameter trees I could find, predominantly Douglas Fir and Western Tamarack (Larch).
In my teen years, we could still find old-growth larch. no bark, no branches, all grey colored, known as Buckskin larch. Usually 2-3' in diameter, easily over 100' tall, with up to two full cords per tree!
Solid dense wood, that was the best of the best!  When splitting these rounds, each chunk was split only enough to fit through the wood stove door; the bigger, the better. As with all box stoves, they were run partially shut down, virtually day and night, from September to May.  Clouds of noxious smoke and vast amounts of wood are needed.
We also always have had a wood cook stove in the kitchen; its wood needed to be split all the way down to 2-3" chunks to facilitate easy starting and hot burning.
These cook stoves are generally run wide open and require smaller pieces of wood. (not to mention the tiny size of the firebox.)
Wood for the cook stove was split "as needed." No one wanted to pre-split wood that far, until they had to...

Then, in 2013, I built our first J-Tube in Liz's art studio (the Studio dragon).  An awesome, incredible stove design that was run wide open at all times.
The wood, of course, needed to be split down to 2-3" to allow the Dragon to roar.  Yes, with an 8" J-Tube I could fit a 5-6" round in the feed tube, but the fire performance suffered, and barrel top temps dropped several hundred degrees.
Switch back to the smaller wood, and the Dragon roared  
We have two different wood sheds, one is strictly for Liz's art studio. It holds apx 5 cords of wood.  All the wood for it is split down to "cook stove" size.
Our other wood shed is much larger, holding 8-10 cords. Its wood is for our house, my shop, and the Walker Black and white oven in our outdoor kitchen (AKA The Smoke Shack)  
Until 2024, that wood was left as large as possible because our home still had the original box stove.
My shop stove is a 7" Batchbox; the larger chunks intended for the house needed to be split smaller.
Batchboxes do have a large door, and you can toss larger pieces in than the old J-Tubes could take.
But I quickly noticed that output temps fell if I used larger wood.
In 2024, in my 100-year-old log cabin, Gerry and I built the first Shorty Core Batchbox in the USA.
With her huge viewing window, you can sit and look down the throat of the dragon (an awe-inspiring sight!)
It was glaringly obvious that you wanted only cookstove-sized wood to produce the most heat.
Unlike a box stove, which you never ever load with small wood and run wide open!
Unless you prefer a glowing red stove and chimney pipes with all your heat racing up and out of the chimney.

Having somehow survived, I have now reached the Gilded years (always heard them called the golden years... They lied!)
I no longer go up in the woods to cut firewood. Now I have a long load of logs delivered directly to my field.
12-15 cords per load. My logger offers me a choice: I can get large wood, or I can get the tops.
They smile when I always ask for the little wood, since most folks still believe their $ 3,000 Blaze King stove is the best, but it needs the larger wood so they can run it shut down...
Needless to say, I get a better price on my load than the other guy.

Yes, even with tops, it takes longer to split down for use as Dragon chow.
But when the house's wood consumption drops from 3-plus cords to perhaps 1.5 cords, you do not have nearly as much time involved.

The Bottom line with RMHs: bigger is definitely not better; smaller wood burns hotter and more efficiently.

Tom, I think your saying ----  Size matters!

Well done.

Good to hear that your house only uses about half the wood , that's a big decrease. But as you said, it's important to spend more time splitting.  
Just curious,  have y'all ever discussed insulating the shop and studio?  I think the fuel needs might be halved again, less  cutting and splitting, if that is a feasible endeavor

It’s very nice to hear—large pieces of wood have to come from the large trees and the more we can get from small shrubs and bushes and windfall, the more sustainable. Our forests need some healing.

Yup, the shop roof now has a few 4x8 sheets up, and I hope to get up more over the summer.
The big opening door leaks like a sieve, but it would take a complete rebuild to seal it up, maybe some other year...
Now the studio is Liz's domain, and according to the boss, it stays as is... she wants the light for her artwork.

The house used its full one cord up, and then some more. Was it another 1/2 cord? Probably less, but I did not measure the excess use.

If you don’t have a “kindling cracker” (wedge with a sharp edge up that can be mounted on a log), get one.  Reduces wood down to smaller sizes in a hurry.  Much safer than a maul or axe for the last split or two. We split logs down to 5-6 inches with a maul then any further with the cracker.  Lots of versions online, but if you are handy with a welder, easy enough to make.  I made 3 of them for us to process biochar material.  Also made a few for gifts.

If you have a conventional wood stove where a lot of the heat goes right out the chimney, and with less or little mass around it, larger logs can be better because they spread the heating out over a longer time rather than having a brief very hot fire where much of heat goes out very quickly.  That's the only advantage of larger logs - a slower cooler burn.  With a RMH or otherwise a long enough chimney and/or enough mass to absorb the heat, it's ideal for the burn to be hot enough to maximize efficiency by burning off all the smoke, and for that, thinner splits are better.

Gray, that's a new one for me, so I reckon I'll post an image...I have a manual splitter who is 14 now, he has an array of axes, hatchets and machetes for his job at the moment

When I was logging there was hardwood for the paper mills and hardwood for firewood buyers. The firewood people were demanding but rightfully so. The trees had to be no bigger than a foot on the butt, clean and thus iterated through the mud. They had to be of the higher btu trees like yellow birch, beech or maple and not ash, basswood or popil. Tops had to be no smaller than 4 inches. And for this I got $20 more per cord.

The paper mills would take anything up to 20 inches. Anything over that was typically log anyway and went to a sawmill, but if it couldn’t it was left in the wood for it, just no market for it.

But struggling to put huge rounds of wood on a splitter is something few people do. Most people want to split their wood four ways or in half. Breaking your back to lift huge pieces of wood makes no sense, nor does whittling down a huge chunk to lots of smaller sizes.

But this is in the Northeast.