Some retailers especially the smaller online e-commerce sites seem to make a huge song and dance about the MC levels of there furniture, although we agree that its important for the furniture to be kiln dried its extremely rare for teak garden furniture to be made from  wood that has not been thoroughly dried before being manufactured.

To check the moisture content level (known as MC%) of wood you can buy a moisture content meter from a local electronics store but these are prone to be inaccurate and will often under read the actual MC% of the wood. There is only one reliable method of measuring the moisture content of the wood and that is with a calibrated moisture content meter, unfortunately these are fairly expensive and out of the reach of the general public. The ones that are used by our own teak4less quality control staff cost over £300 each and are have to be regularly recalibrated to ensure they are accurate, they also have to be used with a temperature probe because the ambient temperature will always affect the MC% reading.We us two different types of moisture meter one that rests on the surface of the wood and one fitted with sharp prongs that are pushed in to the wood (shown in the above photo).

All of our own furniture is dried to a moisture content of around 12%, although we have seen websites claiming to have furniture that is dried to 8% this is highly unlikely to be true, what is more likely is that they are using inaccurate measuring equipment. We recently tested a teak chair that had been used inside a building for 15 to 20 years so it was as dry as it could possibly be, it still read 11.5% on our Moisture Content meter!