Very informative post. I live in Michigan and have an interest in smoking with woods from my own property. I plan to have seasoned pieces of all my good woods for smoking next year, but I really want to smoke with two of them, red oak and red maple, next week. I cut some of each into 1-2 inch thick disks and dried them in my homemade electric smoker at about 240 degF until they stopped steaming plus one additional hour. Aside from the energy cost, what are the downsides to this? The maple was branch wood from a tree cut down in December. The oak was branch wood from a branch that fell last year.