Thermoelectric Stoves: Ditch the Solar Panels?

There's an engineering reason for it, as well, that has nothing to do with economics.

A lot of the apartment blocks built in Russia during the later communist years were built from prefabs - essentially, entire 'rooms' would arrive on trucks from a factory, and would get snapped together like lego bricks.

The plumbing was pre-installed in these rooms - specifically, it would be pre-wired into the solid-concrete walls, at the point of manufacture - so that construction workers did not have to actually do any plumbing at the time of assembly.

This is a great system, because you can put a building together very quickly. It does have a few drawbacks, though.

Russian winters are cold. Really, really, really cold. So cold, in fact, that during winter, hot water plumbed through the buildings is the only thing that keeps their occupants from freezing to death. Most of these buildings don't have any other source of heating.

Of course, if hot water ever stops getting plumbed through your building (Because of, say, a ruptured pipe, a problem at the central heating plant, etc), then, in a matter of days, every single pipe in your apartment block will freeze solid, and explode. This would be bad enough in a 'normal' building, but it is made worse, because the pipes aren't even accessible for maintenance - they are buried deep within the walls of the concrete prefabs.

So long as it is above ambient temperatures, it i useful for something. Feeding low-grade heat into a stratified water thermal storage system is particularly effective. So long as the water is allowed to stratify by temperature, cold water will settle to the bottom and can be heated by any warmer material.

In practice, outflow for (re)heating is at the bottom of the tank, outflow for use at the top, and inflow is through a perforated vertical pipe allowing introduction at level of thermal equilibrium.

Not saying we should promote wood burning, but I'm not tossing out the old wooden stove.

1. Outside air: We're not talking about cities. Burning stuff in dense habitation zones is stupid. Sibling comments have hinted at atmospheric inversion, which is a localized and largely exceptional effect. Also: it's not too hard to take that into account and have a fire at nights and during winter, periods during which people aren't too much out.

2. Inside air: Any well designed and well tended fire-place (and its associated well-dried wood) generates no smoke in the room. If it does you're doing in wrong. If you intend to heat your home you should go for a closed stove, if you intend to cook you should have a well ventilated open-furnace and learn to use it right. Source: my childhood home at the country-side heated exclusively (hot water was electric) with a stove in the living room and an open furnace in the kitchen.

3. Deforestation: we have too much wood. Apart from rain-forests, at "occidental latitudes" most forests are growing (at least i know for sure in france). In my country-side some farmer neighbor always had spare wood to sell, from cutting trees around their fields (of course you have to do it intelligently: not cut the younger ones, etc). A farm of a half a dozen hectares can be self-sufficient in heating wood (source: neighbors).

I wonder how modern pellet stoves with more complete combustion compare to traditional wood fires?