Testing of wood durability is today done mainly with accelerated exposure tests under rather realistic conditions (in ground, outdoors with moisture traps etc). Although such tests are accelerated with respect to the conditions that outdoor exposed wood structures are exposed to, they tend to take rather long time. The present paper presents the development of a rapid method intended to assess at least some relevant aspects of the kinetics of the decay of wood materials. The method uses isothermal calorimetry – that determines the heat production rate from the fungal metabolism as a measure of fungal activity – and can be used to study, for example, the kinetics of colonization of a wood substrate. In this paper the method is described and some first results are given. It is shown that the colonization of a small pine sapwood sample can be followed over several weeks, from low heat production in the beginning, to higher and higher heat production rates when the colonization accelerates. It is also shown how the colonization of a material with a water-soluble fungicide is significantly delayed as the fungicide diffuses into the wood material with the inoculum.

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