Avoid using wood burning stoves if possible, warn health experts | Hacker News Reader

Avoid using wood burning stoves if possible, warn health experts

theguardian.com

85 pointsGordonS109 comments

>Wood burners have become increasingly popular in recent years [...] Almost 16% of people in the south-east of England use wood fuel, and 18% in Northern Ireland, according to 2016 government data, and about 175,000 wood burners are sold annually.

If you're wondering why they're so popular, it's because wood counts as "renewable fuel", so it helps EU countries meet their renewable energy targets.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331390

I think they're also popular because

* people have wood anyway so they might as well use it for something

* it often suits the design of houses here which were historically built for a central stove burner like this

* many people have wood-burning stoves for cooking that are extremely large and heavy permanent fixtures in their kitchen and cannot easily be removed or adapted and are designed to permanently be burning wood so you can't really turn them off either

* people like the smell and aesthetic (note this article is in just about the most middle-class publication there is in the UK)

> people like the smell and aesthetic (note this article is in just about the most middle-class publication there is in the UK)

The problem here and described in the article is that people are not using direct vent stoves/fireplaces. What is being talking about are units that vent out a chimney/flue, but take the air for combustion from the house itself. This is not what you want for health or efficiency reasons.

What you want is to take air from the outside, have it combust the fuel, and then be vented outside:

* https://www.napoleon.com/en/ca/fireplaces/blog/how-direct-ve...

* https://www.northcountryfire.com/blogs/news/what-is-a-direct...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKCwg8jwHd8

The only thing that should enter the living space is radiant heat.

Also: if the smoke exiting your fireplace/stove is dark (or even grey), then you have an inefficient unit. The exhaust air should be clear, as that means 'everything' has been burned. In the US, the now-mandated EPA BurnWise standard has stoves being between 60-80% efficient (depending on the design):

* https://www.epa.gov/burnwise/frequent-questions-about-wood-b...

You can find people saying that they use one-half or even one-third of the wood that they used to after upgrading.

Also a useful hint: if you're going to use one in a domicile where you live for long periods of time, it may be worth looking at soapstone designs, as they retain heat more (though warm up is longer). For shorter periods, e.g., in a cabin/cottage, then iron could be better as it heats/cools quicker, so that may be fine for a (long) weekend stay.

For best results, regardless of heating method, make sure you make your domicile more airtight to reduce drafts, and increase insulation.

> Also a useful hint: if you're going to use one in a domicile where you live for long periods of time, it may be worth looking at soapstone designs, as they retain heat more (though warm up is longer)

Why would that matter? The amount of heat transferred to the living space is the same.

I can see the benefit of radiating some residual heat when not active (for example, through the night) but that seems to be offset by the delay you'd have when you start it up again.

Well, not having to wake up in the middle of the night is not a small matter.

Also, even if the fire goes out you'll get some residual heat and so you have some time to get it going again. This may not be a big deal at 0C, but if it's -20C outside then it may be a higher priority.

From various reviews I've read, the heat 'feels' different: not as intense but rather 'softer' and 'even'.

‘This is not what you want for health’

Could you elaborate? Is it because then you have draft in the room?

Well, combustion create particulates, carbon monoxide, etc: do you really want these things in your living quarters?

Further, creating drafts in houses isn't a good thing as it forces air in via crevices, door jams, windows casings, etc. As it moves these holes who knows what kind of nasty things the air is picking up from behind your walls.

A lot of folks are under the mistaken impression that houses need to 'breathe'; they do not:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIcrXut_EFA

You want your house to be as airtight as possible, and then bring in air in a controlled fashion on your own terms: conditioned and filtered.

Outdoor wood furnaces (boilers) became very popular over the last 15 years. They are cheaper than fuel oil. A traditional wood stove has to be refilled every 2 hours (or so), and is also a major fire hazard. "Wood burners" may also include pellet stoves which are also increasingly popular for similar reasons.

I have an outdoor wood furnace. It's great at cutting down smoke as it has a re-burner section that keeps the temperature high enough that their is almost no smoke once it gets up to temperature.

But there is a lot more maintenance with something like this. I have to have about 6 cords of wood to make it through winter (which mostly comes off my property) but that also means handling the fuel (bucking and then splitting the wood as well as having the space to let it season for a year to dry it). Filling up the furnace once or twice a day depending on the weather. Cleaning out the ash once a month. And now that it's getting older (8 years) I have to fix up some of the welds inside the main chamber.

I don't mind the extra work as it saves a lot of money in electricity bills and all that splitting of wood has been good exercise. But I wouldn't recommend it unless you have the time and energy to do the work.

No smoke, but what about particulate matter? I understand these efficient wood burners are major urban polluters even without the smoke. They sure don't seem to smell any less.

Once the temperature within the furnace gets to about 900F I can't even really smell it anymore and the exhaust looks clear as far as I can tell in daylight. This is the benefit of using a large and well built wood furnace. Also all of the wood I use is dry which not only reduces the amount of bad stuff that gets into the air it also increases the usable heat from the wood.

I also live in a very rural area on a 1 hectare lot surrounded by other 1 and 2 hectare lots. I would not want to run this in a typical suburb and I agree with most the other comments that wood burning really shouldn't be a thing in densely populated areas.

Unfortunately for me my only other real option is electricity which can be relatively intermittent where I am and also expensive. It would end up costing $700-$1000 extra during winter months. I'm heating two homes with it. A newer one with walls at an R40+ rating and an older one with walls at a recently upgraded from nothing to an R20 rating. The money I'm saving on electricity will be going into add more insulation into the older home for even better long term benefits.

Check out the below site if you'd like to learn a bit more about what the typical issues are and what's trying to be done to help reduce the problems. https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/strateg...

Can't say I've ever seen an outdoor boiler in a home counties garden. But maybe you're talking about something specific?

Three minute video:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PL0yBdvSxA

12 minute video from an owner:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQc8p-roy-E

Popular for off-grid situations.

www.central-boiler.co.uk ?

Additionally, electricity, district heating, coal, gas and oil are getting more and more expensive due to carbon and renewable taxes. Renewables like photovoltaics and photothermics, along with heat pumps, are also increasing in price, because there is high demand on specialized workers for installation. The only thing that actually is getting cheaper is wood, a stove is comparatively cheap anyways (few hundred euros, compared to over 10k for anything renewable), and current climate plus tree pests cause a large amount of cheap firewood.

Also, there seems to be the dogma with professional renewable planners that room temperature should not rise above 18°C. I know people where their renewable heating was dimensioned too small, who then supplement by wood stove to at least get a cozy living room in winter.

Electric heating using a heat pump or especially photovoltaics (with net metering) is cheaper than burning fossil fuels in Central Europe and completely emission free.

Thats completely beside the point, renewable is more expensive than wood. Also, while renewables might be cheaper in the long run, initial costs are very high.

And power mix in central europe, which you feed into your heat pump, is largely coal. Photovoltaics in winter are only a very small part of the mix. Wind depends on the weather pattern, but around here cold weather usually brings calm. Winter is also dry season, so hydro is lacking as well. So your typical heat pump will be far from emission free.

As someone who lives in South East Queensland, the idea of an 18 degree indoor temperature is absolutely wild to me haha. My aircon is set at 25 right now and even that’s a little cold

Gender and body mass play a part, but I guess it also just depends what you're used to.

I live in Scotland (1C just now), and through gas central heating (very common) we have the house between 18-20C degrees, depending on how we feel.

When we travel somewhere hot on vacation, and are using AC indoors, we usually have it between 20C and 21C.

When I travel for business to India, the AC in offices is generally set at 25C, and I find that really unpleasantly warm, to the point where it makes me sweat (I'm not a particularly large person) and makes me sleepy.

Thats coming from the opposite direction. Around here, heating is necessary to get up to 18°C. Aircon to get down from warm temperatures in summer is uncommon, usually it doesn't rise above 30°C outside.

In the UK it is overwhelmingly about fashion and recreation. Middle age men love to chop wood. There is usually an affordable alternative which is objectively better at heating a house.

And this is why blindly following regulations, without truly understanding their consequences is dumb. From what I heard, the Trump administration got flak for bailing out of the Paris agreement because they felt that the agreement was similarly dumb.

I thought this was well-known? I live in Montréal and there are pretty serious regulations on wood burning stoves [1-2]. I grew up in a wood heated house and I sure love sitting by the stove, but that was in the country with extremely low housing density. I'm not super convinced about indoor air pollution, with the right stove?

French links, Google translate should get the gist [1] http://www1.ville.montreal.qc.ca/banque311/content/po%C3%AAl... [2] https://www.lapresse.ca/maison/immobilier/conseils/201804/17...

You still need to open them to fuel them, and people do that fairly frequently, which floods the space with particulates.

> The results showed the burners were usually lit for about four hours at a time, and during this period the level of harmful particles in homes was three times higher than when stoves were not being used.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/18/wood-bur...

Presumably when the stove is not in use the amount of harful particles is very low. So a three times increase of a very small number is also very small.

The paper says that short-term peaks are linked to health issues (from page 2):

> epidemiologists are increasingly recognising that exposure to high intensities of PM over much shorter periods of time—hours rather than days—is linked to a range of health issues .Indeed, Lin et al. found a significant association between hourly peakPM2.5andmortality rates across six Chinese cities. Similarly, a systematic review of 196 articles found a positive relationship between short term PM exposure and cardiovascular, respiratory, and cerebrovascular mortality

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/11/12/1326#

I have a neighbor who burns wood every day, and I bought an air quality monitor to see what the impact is on our air.

The AQI hits 150 when it’s burning, which is really unhealthy. I was surprised it was this bad, especially since he’s not that close of a neighbor (on a different street even).

I, too, have a neighbor with a wood burner (used during the cold months only fortunately) that easily adds 75 to 100 to the outdoor AQI (using Purple Air). My indoor air quality is unaffected due to central air filtering.

Given the health impact, these burners should be seized and replaced with almost anything else, with full financial assistance. (Why? It's cheaper to replace these burners than it is to suffer the long term public health costs caused by their existence).

I’m a huge fan of providing incentives for people to upgrade, but I would fight tooth and nail against seizing inefficient burners. Opening up the door for the government to randomly deprive citizens of their property is an awful door to open, and it will be abused eventually, no matter how just the cause feels today.

What do you think about noise pollution?

I'm ok with fining people for it. I'm not fine with wandering around and seizing personal property that could conceivably be used to produce noise pollution.

Generally speaking, we should only allow the government to intervene in personal freedoms when there is a compelling interest, and we should expect that the interventions are tailored to be as minimal as possible. A compelling reason existing is no excuse to give the government unlimited powers, for fairly obvious reasons.

For corporations, this obviously means complying with a robust regulatory framework; if I own a company that sells wood burning stoves, then I have to comply with EPA regulations around how many grams per hour of soot it may emit when properly maintained. In exchange for having to keep up with the changing regulations, the government should provide reasonable timelines and clarity around what is expected.

As a private citizen, this means accepting some limitations on how we use our private property. As a citizen I can legally purchase a car, own a firearm, and consume alcohol, but if I decide to use all three at once I will probably lose my right to have all three, plus I'll get locked in jail. Occasionally changing regulatory requirements will mean that certain pieces of equipment can't be operated anymore; if you had a car that had to use leaded fuel (not a substitute), then it would effectively be illegal to operate it going forward. What is not fine is for the government to say "your car needs leaded fuel, so we are going to seize it from you".

The government should not be in the business of seizing private property that may be used to violate the law, especially when it was purchased legally. We don't do pre-crime in this country, owning something that may be used to violate the law is not a crime punishable by loss of private property. We also have constitutional protections against ex post facto laws; you cannot punish a citizen for what they purchased back when it was legal. If it's necessary to put strict limits on pollution and fine users who exceed them, that is fine by me. I'd even be happy to pay a bit more in taxes to fund optional buybacks and incentives to help users buy newer and more efficient units. But proposing that the government go and seize private property that may be used to eventually break some new regulation is beyond the pale.

In California, it is illegal to burn (except for cooking or if you have no other way to heat your home) on Spare the Air days. Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of homes in the Bay Area that fall into the latter exception.

I recently heard about this nonprofit that is helping people retrofit their homes and get rid of wood burning stoves.

http://www.rebuildingtogetherpeninsula.org/

> these burners should be seized and replaced

Wood is far cheaper than alternatives, often even free (e.g., a neighbor cuts down a tree, you get rid of it for them). Financial assistance is onerous to obtain.

You're also assuming it's appropriate for some government beurocrat to make such a decision on the first place. "It's my woodstove, you can't have it."

> You're also assuming it's appropriate for some government beurocrat to make such a decision on the first place. "

China banned the country from getting pallets of plastic because once they factored in the public health costs, it wasn't profitable (and it was barely profitable before hand).

The government bans people from driving while drunk because they have a potential to hurt others. We have precedence for the government limiting various freedoms for the safety of others. For example, in most of the US you can't smoke when there are others nearby or when indoors.

There's a clear difference between prohibiting drunk driving, and telling me I can't continue to use my wood stove inside my own home.

Absolutely. Keep 100% of the smoke inside your own home, and it's nobody's business except yours and your home mortgage company's.

They are both cases of individual behavior creating negative externalities for others. In the case of drunk driving, there is a risk of sudden death. In the case of wood burning stoves, there is a risk (more of a certainty, actually) that nearby people will have their health negatively impacted over a longer time horizon.

Drunk driving generates more obvious and immediate effects, but burning a wood stove or fireplace can still harm others.

There's also a pretty strong similarity. We're all driving the same roads; we're all breathing the same air.

Prohibiting drunk driving doesn’t involve depriving citizens of their property, especially property that was legal when they bought it.

It literally does though. Drunk driving removes the usability of their cars that they could've spent tens of thousands of dollars on this.

There is a clear and important distinction between restrictions on how property can be used, and the government literally seizing property. Trying to argue that those are one and the same is just silly.

A better parallel would be fining based on emissions, which I would be fine with. But actually seizing private property? Hell no.

> But actually seizing private property? Hell no.

Yeah like your car being seized due to not paying the yearly registration fee?

Only if you're driving it on a public road.

Again, laws around how property is used are fine. There are all kinds of ways you can misuse your property that will result in it being taken from you; in general all of us are fine with that. It's legal to drink, and it's legal to drive, but if you drink and drive you might lose property or your freedom, probably both.

What's not fine is the government saying "you purchased this legally and in good faith, but it's not legal anymore and we're going to need to take that". This feels like a good idea when it's something with obvious negative externalities, but it is a wildly dangerous power to give the government. Especially since this power will almost certainly be delegated to the executive branch by the legislature, giving random un-elected appointees the ability to expropriate property without even a hint of deliberation.

Oh, and it's probably an ex post facto issue anyways. You generally can't punish people for something that was legal at the time that they did it. This is why various gun regulations almost always exclude all banned items that are currently in private hands, because attempts to take that property away would be unconstitutional.

> Only if you're driving it on a public road.

This actually depends on the jurisdiction. In many of them not having an active registration/inspection is grounds to having your vehicle seized. Even if it's only used on private roads.

> What's not fine is the government saying "you purchased this legally and in good faith, but it's not legal anymore and we're going to need to take that". This feels like a good idea when it's something with obvious negative externalities, but it is a wildly dangerous power to give the government. Especially since this power will almost certainly be delegated to the executive branch by the legislature, giving random un-elected appointees the ability to expropriate property without even a hint of deliberation.

Sure, except if compensation isn't offered.

The government currently does this all the time, it's actually how many "public" offices fund themselves.

Where is the outrage of this happening right now? We've already crossed that line.

> You generally can't punish people for something that was legal at the time that they did it.

We also do this currently. It's called not having clear laws and having to argue in court and creating new precedent.

And "punish" only works if you're not offered compensation. If the government says "hey as your representatives we're going to ban xyz for this health reason, and provide compensation for buying them back from you" then it's fine.

Again I'm not saying the government should waste resources going and finding wood burning systems and seizing them. However the government can ban the operation of it.

> This actually depends on the jurisdiction. In many of them not having an active registration/inspection is grounds to having your vehicle seized. Even if it's only used on private roads.

[Citation needed]

In all jurisdictions I've lived, you can put your vehicle into "planned non-operation" status, where it no longer requires registration.

> Where is the outrage of this happening right now? We've already crossed that line.

I find civil asset forfeiture outrageous. There you go. We've discussed it a lot here, and most of us hate it and see it as nothing more than legalized theft.

> And "punish" only works if you're not offered compensation. If the government says "hey as your representatives we're going to ban xyz for this health reason, and provide compensation for buying them back from you" then it's fine.

Compensation for a buy back is very different from compensation for seizure. From a policy perspective a buy back is probably a great idea, but let's not pretend that it's anywhere near the same legal ballpark as seizure, even with compensation.

> Again I'm not saying the government should waste resources going and finding wood burning systems and seizing them. However the government can ban the operation of it.

It's worth pointing out that banning ownership and banning operation are very different beasts. Leaded gasoline is illegal (well, for cars); if you have a car that for whatever reason needed leaded gasoline then operating it is illegal. But it's not illegal to own a car that requires leaded gasoline. The legal leap from "you can't run this because it will hurt people" to "you can't own a thing that was once legal and now isn't because you might use it and that would hurt people" is immense.

For the record, I'm fine in principle with banning inefficient fireplaces, although I think that such a ban would be effectively impossible to enforce. I think that optional buybacks for inefficient wood burners and incentives to upgrade to (increasingly tightly regulated) stoves is a good policy move. What I don't support is the leap from "this thing is bad, and therefore we should make it illegal for you to own". That is an immensely bad habit to get into, for the reasons I've mentioned above.

There is no such thing.

Is the difference that the other one makes sense because it's been around for decades while this one is an emerging study?

If your wood burning is proven to increase the risk of cancer for your neighbours, what does that mean?

If the air quality impact was limited to inside your home that would be the case.

> I have a neighbor who burns wood every day, and I bought an air quality monitor to see what the impact is on our air.

How old is their unit? The new EPA BurnWise standard seems to really help things with efficiency and particulate.

As a rule of thumb: the exhaust gases should be clear. If it's not (i.e., black or grey smoke), then there's lots of material that hasn't been combusted which is wasteful and unhealthy.

I don't know if this affects your argument, but are you sure you can trust the AQI meter's readings for anomalous levels?

We recently had a discussion on this topic: [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138485

This is an indoor measurement in your house or an outside street measurement?

Outside my front door. Every time we bring in a package the smell of smoke spreads through the house. And we can’t open windows to air out the baby’s room (after a diaper change) since we’d be swapping smelly air for air that is both smelly and unhealthy.

Which air quality monitor did you purchase?

I’m using a PocketLab device. I actually know the PocketLab guys from the Intel Education Accelerator; we were in the initial cohort together. I would have otherwise purchased a purple air device.

Anyone know how this compares to other daily hazards (living on a main road, being overweight etc)?

Edit

Looks like you can get a hepa filter for £70 that will fix the issue for the most part.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08G8JHGWH/ref=cm_sw_r_wa_apa_fa...

And gas stoves (and so presumably fires?) are also a problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/05/gas-stov...

Thank god we mastered central heating decades back...

> Looks like you can get a hepa filter for £70 that will fix the issue for the most part.

True though that may be, I think the main issue is the spoiling of the commons: the air we breathe. I love my indoor air filters, but I sure do like fresh outdoor air as well.

With regards to the gas stoves: it's mostly an issue of indoor air pollution which is certainly valid (a lot of particulate matter is created when cooking anything with heat). Even a properly sealed / ventilated wood stove is creating a lot more pollution than an equivalent gas one.

Now if we could only heat our house by mining bitcoin we'd all be better off. /s

This article says breathing the air in Beijing on one day is 15 micromorts. Beijing seems to have a P2.5 AQI of 50-100. You can use that to compare to the hazard of your choice.

https://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report-every-breath-you-t...

> Looks like you can get a hepa filter for £70 that will fix the issue for the most part.

That's not a fix.

Walking down a middle-class street in the UK on a cold, calm day, the smell of smoke from the various wood burners is quite apparent. Amazing these are allowed when the controls on other particulate emitters, e.g. diesel cars, are (rightly) so strict.

This has long been an issue for developing nations [0], somehow the UK is well behind the curve (wood burners in town seem to be status symbols here).

[0] https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/cooking-stoves-i...

Low Tech Magazine, one of my favorite sites online, has written a few articles on wood and biomass:

- Well-Tended Fires Outperform Modern Cooking Stoves: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-c...

- Too Much Combustion, Too Little Fire: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/12/too-much-combustion-...

- How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/09/how-to-make-biomass-...

Low Tech Magazine is pretty much bullshit from cover to cover and these articles are great examples of the genre. Read the first one with a critical eye. It doesn't make any sense. It's just a deceptive argument constructed to make performative primitivism seem competitive with modern technology, which it isn't. An electric induction cooker is superior to any kind of fire, in all aspects and ways, by large margins in every direction.

If you actually read the article you'll see that by "outperform" they're comparing the efficiency of a wood stove in converting biomass to useful heat, against the efficiency of a power plant and electric stove in converting fuel to useful heat.

It's no surprise that a wood stove did better in that comparison. It's one conversion vs two. It's a perfectly reasonable comparison to make in many circumstances, eg in poorer countries with less well developed electricity infrastructure who still need to transition away from fossil fuels.

From the article:

> This means that if your electric stove is operated by electricity from a biomass power plant -- a fast growing "green" trend nowadays -- the power conversion efficiency is three to four times lower (11-14%) than the authors of the study assume, and thermal efficiency drops to about 5%. This is similar to the thermal efficiency of a neglected open fire, and one-tenth the thermal efficiency of a rocket stove. Likewise, a cookstove which uses coal or gas directly to heat food is much more energy efficient than a cookstove that runs on electricity produced by a coal or gas power plant.

Re: air pollution, they're completely right to point out that cooking itself - regardless of the heat source used - generates tons of indoor air pollution anyway, making the air pollution concern of wood fired stoves not as clear as you'd expect. You should be ventilating all cooking to the outdoors.

> Any biomass stove design with a chimney basically achieves the same. If a chimney is added to an indoor biomass stove, indoor air pollution drops to almost zero.

They're also quite clear that these trade-offs differ for poor vs rich countries:

> Although it's remarkable how the proposed solutions for this energy inefficiency differ for poor and rich countries. In the developing world, the focus is mainly on designing more efficient biomass stoves that produce fewer pollutants. While achieved savings as a result of switching to biogas would be larger, its investment would be 30 times higher compared to the distribution of improved wood cooking stoves.

I did read the article and it is intentionally misleading. They count the loss of heat radiated away from the cooking vessel against the efficiency of an induction cooker, but don't mention (or perhaps don't know) that because of the nature of induction heating you can actually use insulated pots with them. You can wrap a pot in your sweater if you want, because there's no open flame.

You can use insulated pots with wood stoves as well. I've even personally seen these sold for camping in the past. I can't find any pre-made ones for sale right now online. But things like the Solo Stove Campfire would work just fine with an insulated pot: https://www.solostove.com/solo-stove-campfire/

Fireproof insulation exists after all. Even something as simple as wrapping a pot with crumbled aluminum foil works quite well: the aluminum traps air, an excellent insulator.

'An electric induction cooker is superior to any kind of fire, in all aspects and ways, by large margins in every direction.' - except in running costs, I have no idea but assume they draw around 2000 watts for each plate.

  Alternatively, I can collect enough firewood in a few days of my spare time, I would have spent in the woods anyway, that will heat my modestly sized house cozily and cook all my meals for at least 6 months of the years in temperatures that can drop to as low as -40 Celsius for days at a time.  All it cost me was a bit of sweat and hard yakka in the autumn.

I agree that this article paints an unrealistic picture, and that broadly speaking an induction stove is "superior". But I disagree with "in all aspects and ways, by large margins in every direction". Cooking meat on a wood fire gives a very distinct char and flavor which I don't believe you can replicate perfectly on an induction stove. I personally love that taste.

Try roasting marshmallows on your induction cooker.

I can easily heat a carbon steel crepe pan to red hot on an induction cooker. Roasting marshmallows is no problem.

Is there anything else you haven't tried that you'd care to opine on?

Wouldn't a cast iron skillet on an induction cooker radiate enough heat to roast marshmallows?

What regulations does the UK have for wood burning stoves? Here in America we have pretty tight regulations on wood burning stoves for the particulate they can emit. Starting in 2020 new stoves can only emit 2.0g/hr of particulate, down from the 4.5g/hr that was the rule from 2015. Most stoves I’ve seen come in at 1.54g/hr, but I’ve seen a few down at 0.5g/hr. It’s not uncommon to see stoves with catalytic converters in them to fully burn off any particulate.

Obviously this isn’t as clean as natural gas, which emits close to no particulate, but it’s a long way from a coal fireplace. I wonder if such regulations would help, or would they not be sufficient?

EPA mandate for 2020 that's been in the works for a while:

* https://www.epa.gov/burnwise

COPD damage to lungs due to open fire exposure is a real thing. No one should have to learn this the hard way for themselves.

If you smell wood smoke your fireplace is either not an efficient design or you are burning the wood wrong. A modern efficient fireplace with a catalytic converter does a really good job at converting wood to heat.

And the article makes no mention of catalytic wood stoves, which drives me nuts because I thought pretty much all the recent ones included at least an option for a catalyst.

Does a wood-stove catalytic converter help with PM2.5? That seemed to be the main focus of the article.

It burns hotter which means it does a better job at combustion. I'd imagine the PM2.5 is much lower for a hotter fire.

Note that catalytic convertors are not strictly necessar. Plenty of EPA-approved designs use other mechanisms to achieve the same result:

* https://www.epa.gov/burnwise

I'm wondering if this is also be applicable in the case of a closed combustion wood burning fireplace? (internally, at least). My understanding is that they create quite a tight seal when all closed up.

> Wood burners cause less indoor pollution than open fires. “But every time you open the door, you reduce the stove to an open fire and particulate matter floods into the home,” he said. The peaks take an hour or two to dissipate. “But by the time it comes down, someone opens the door again to refuel and you get spike after spike,” Chakraborty said. Some burners have filters, but these only reduce the pollution being vented outside.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/18/wood-bur...

This really just feels like a salvo in a slow gradual fight between people who just don't personally like wood stoves and anyone else wo either likes them or doesn't really care.

I actually like the smell of my neighbors wood stove.

I don't even know who it is since I'm in a dense area. I don't own a wood stove myself so I'm not just protecting my own. I did grow up in houses with them. Everyone's house had them. (upstate ny)

I wish people would not abuse the concept of public good or shared space etc just to get their way about every single thing they personally don't prefer.

You don't like wood smoke in winter? Go live in an HOA that doesn't allow them. It's a smell not a public health hazard.

Besides, oil and gas furnaces and coal and gas fired power plants are better? Really? Because that's what the alternatives are still. We're still a long way from having cheap plentiful electricity that doesn't come from a bad source.

If this article is really ultimately driven by what it claims about a health hazard from particulates, then why does it only propose removing all wood burners instead of say, developing some kind of catalytic converter or double-burner or other means of cleaning the exhaust?

I would be more interested in a study of actual health histories and stats of areas where stoves were common vs not, than in this measurement of particulates and a claim that they are bad.

We have burned wood for thousand of years, and its considered a luxury to have an open fire in your house. And we make camp fires. Either its not that bad for us or we are really stupid.

There's an art to burning a wood stove in a modern home and not making a mess. Most people don't use the ash tray systems that come with these modern catalyzed wood stoves they don't know how to use them and they don't care even if they're taught because it's a slight inconvenience. I treat Ash in my wood burning stove as being a harmful carcinogen. There's also an art to starting a fire without getting a backdraft and getting smoke in your home. A few tips would be to make sure you're burning good quality wood that's been properly seasoned, seasoning firewood is also an art. When you need to empty the ash into the tray burn the fire at hotter than normal to deplete all of the carbon so all you have to deal with is small particles of Ash. Keep the fire going in place the depleted Ash in the tray to cool don't try to move hot ash it would just become a cloud in the air. Set your furnace to run the fan for several hours after you empty the tray. I'm not joking on this one I've been doing it for the last five years wear some sort of facial covering a mask a bandana whatever over your mouth.

Around here I can get a months worth of wood for about 100-150$. A months worth of oil is about 1000$. Also wood heat is so hot an excessive I walk around in my underwear most the day. But with oil I can barely afford to keep the temp enough. I compare oil because most homes around where I live still have oil furnaces. I know lots of people that seek out wood stoves. I can’t imagine they can afford to have a choice at that difference.

Buy some insulation, would be my unsolicited recommendation.

Ugh, and here I was really liking the idea of wood burning. I really liked how little of a climate impact it has... :(

Other forms of heating is just so expensive in cold places though.

I think the climate benefit is overstated. Trees take a long time to grow and we need to cut co2 now. Presumably you need to be planting substantially more trees than are felled to improve co2 in an acceptable time scale.

Eh, trees are the least of our concerns though.

Like, trees aren't gonna put the carbon back into the ground which is where our problem started (coal, oil).

I don't see trees as a solution or even as a delaying factor.

Many people do small fires and try to let the fire alive as long as possible. The consequences are that the stove is not hot enough to ignite the fumes. This yields to a poor fire: low efficiency, high particle emissions, and poor heat.

The "real" way is to light it from the top, and don't be afraid to make a big one.

Has anyone done the numbers on Coronvirus hospitalizations and wood burning stoves?

I remember reading Fireplace Delusion by Sam Harris [1] (it's about religion, but uses the fireplace as an analogy of harmful thing that people in some sense know that is harmful but still keep enjoying and using) a long time ago and have been thinking the harmfulness of burning wood ever since. It's weird how hard it is to take news like this in even though it's backed by actual science. I just like the smell and the type of the warmness that a wood stove (or a fireplace) creates and would use them instead of electric stove or heaters when given a chance.

I'm pretty sure people can't be cured of brain bugs like this after some age or some degree of conditioning (in the sense of "it's always been like this and I don't want to change"). Hopefully the next generation is raised better based on new data and will be smarter than us. (Or at least me.)

1: https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/

I am surprised to learn that burning wood for heat/cooking is something done outside Amish type communities at any significant level in the developed world.

When COVID dies down please spend some time traveling outside of cities so you can understand how people outside your bubble live.

Wood is very common in rural areas. Cold areas that don't have city gas largely rely on fuel oil (diesel), propane, and/or wood. Fuel oil and propane are both significantly more expensive than wood, even if you buy it pre-cut. If you have land and cut it yourself the biggest cost is time.

Agree, parent comment says a lot about the bubble some people live in.

If you live in the rural parts of the northeastern US you'll end up with a years supply of wood just by occasionally clearing your land. It makes a lot of sense to use it for heat, many houses up there have both oil and a wood burning stove for heat.

And if you didn’t use the wood it would decompose and release the carbon anyway. Too much wood burning in the neighbourhood can be bad for air quality though.

Wood, often industrial wood waste, is simply the cheapest heat source in many regions. It's relatively common in suburban and rural Canada, and in the cold northern parts of the USA as well. Also the Nordic countries and Hokkaido in Japan. Probably anywhere with a low population density and a lot of trees.

I know Finland has wood-fired electric power plants in the hundred-megawatt range. Just like a small coal plant but with a wood-fired burner. And while not wood, in a similar vein I believe Ireland was burning peat for electricity until recently.

On the Old Continent, there are a lot of old houses (I'm writing from a 400 year old one, older than the USA), about 10% being more than 100 year old [1], most of which comes with a central chimney (or several).

While a lot of people have other heating/cooking systems, those chimney are still in use to some capacity.

[1] http://www.iut.nu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Housing-Statist...

The street on which I live is probably about 900 years old. The houses have been rebuild many times, but there is still wood in some houses here that's been dated to the 1530s. My own house only dates to c. 1870-80, though it's made of recycled stone and wood, presumably from the house known from records to have been on the same site in 1620. Apparently, there was considerable demolition and new builds/rebuilding in the town in the 1870s. All the houses in the street have chimneys, and there's a ready supply of wood locally, either gathered from the countryside or purchased from one of the many suppliers. Unsurprisingly, fires/stoves are frequently used for heating, and there's usually a smell of smoke outside in winter. My house originally had three flues; one for the kitchen range (now blocked off and the range replaced with a sink), one in the master bedroom (blocked off with the fireplace merely decorative) and one in the main living room (fitted with a modern stove).

This could be why I haven't heard of it. I live in an urban area, but have never heard much about wood burning as a significant heat source in any nearby rural area or any area where my relatives live. And in Canada, it is basically only the 200 year old places that do it.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-526-s/2013002/t002-en...

Huh? New homes are built with wood fireplaces. People enjoy it, even if it’s not the primary fuel source.

My mum grew up in one of those old farm houses that were heated by open fires. It was always freezing cold in the winter in most of the house. The whole place was later fitted with oil fired heating. My grandmother could never understand why we wanted to build a fire when we visited. The people installing wood burners are a new generation that grew up in centrally heated homes and see it as romantic.

I hate central heating!

My natural body temperature preference is to be too cold rather than too hot[0]. And people always have central heating on far too high for my comfort. When I'm in a building with central heating, I feel my face starting to flush and sweat prickling out on my back. It's horrible and makes me feel really uncomfortable. And because it's "central" heating, I have no option but to suffer.

With an open fire, on the other hand, everyone can regulate the temperature around them to their own comfort level : Too cold? Move closer to the fire. Too warm? Move further away. Central heating is the fascism of domestic temperature control!

[0] I realise I'm probably a rarity in this. I never have the heating on at all in my own home, even in winter. If I get a bit cold, I just stick a jersey on.

Among those who don't live in cookie-cutter neighborhoods or cities, this is very common in the midwest US.

My parents weren't able to afford to get any other kind of heating for our home. What they could do is put in the work to find and prepare a supply of wood. To this day they still use it for heating

Its extremely common in rural Finland.

Well, no shit. On the other hand, wood is really cheap, and if you want to heat up to 75-85 F, there's really no substitute.

Central heating?

The price of doing that with electric or oil or natural gas will cripple you. There's a reason thermostats are set to 60 or 65 degrees.

With wood you just chuck another stick in the furnace and let her rip.

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