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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

It is - but particulates are a massive health issue.

I totally agree.

In the UK, many (often well off) people in towns and cities want to have an open fire or wood stove for fun. It makes no sense for this to be legal in densely-populated areas, that can afford cleaner alternatives.

We moved into a house during COVID and it came with a stove - it was significantly cheaper to run the stove than our gas boiler - £3 roughly for an evening compared to probably £12-15 to heat with the boiler. Across 3-4 months of winter that's an enormous saving

Cheaper for you but if you live anywhere near others the cost to the communities health is a lot more. London's air is often terrible thanks to wood burning and bloody fireworks! Why we allow this I will never know.

I'm gonna stick a "citation needed" here. I have discerned no obvious difference in air quality from wood burners in the winter so unless London has a lot of folks burning wood in the summer I find it unlikely. As for Fireworks, their usage is so infrequent that I find the idea of "often" slightly confusing.
Disclosure, my family had open fires and then log burners for as long as I've been alive. Not in London where I now live. I love a proper fire, it's great, one of the things I enjoy about visiting family in the countryside.

I am, however, ambivalent about the things and wouldn't resent them being banned.

I'm the person with a city center wood burner - They're terrible for air quality [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/30/home-woo...

And not all particulates are the same. If i recall, wood burning yields rather large particulates which are less bad then something like diesel fumes, which are smaller. I find some of the comments here strange… complaining about lack of insulation and use of wood. While the alternative is over insulation with inevitable mold in the walls from vapor.

> As for Fireworks, their usage is so infrequent that I find the idea of "often" slightly confusing.

Not in the context of London, but I live near an amusement park and they launch fireworks every weekend while the park is in season. I don't smell or notice any difference in air quality except for after the 4th of July when they launch a lot more of them.

You're probably not noticing any odors from your local municipal fireworks because they launch them quite a bit higher into the air than your typical neighbor is going to be sending their firecrackers and bottle rockets, making it someone else's problem. The reason industrial smoke stacks are as tall as they are is to get the smoke away from the immediate vicinity/surface.

That absolutely makes sense.

lol at citation needed, just go out in a village that has more then 10 people running wood/coal stoves and try to breathe...

_Disclosure I also have open fire pit in a garden, and love occasional fire_

I mean, I grew up in environments like that and I and there is no noticeable difference as I walk out and back again (order miles).

I will say that if folks are having proper bonfires - that absolutely makes a difference. Largely because they are not burning dry wood.

> Cheaper for you but if you live anywhere near others the cost to the communities health is a lot more.

I live in the middle of a city centre. My next door neighbour burns coal in an open fire too, it's shocking.

I don't disagree with you, but when I'm looking at saving £250/month on top of all my other costs skyrocketing, it becomes an attractive thing to use.

That makes me wonder: Can you take a car's catalytic converter and fit it onto a fireplace's stovepipe? It seems like it should be a simple fix for lowering the amount of soot that gets out

Not sure why you're downvoted, but yes! Modern wood burning stoves can come with catalytic converters [0], which can make the stove burn more efficiently as well as lowering emissions.

Generally the stoves are designed specially for this. The stove burns hotter and may have a second combustion chamber. DIYers welding in the catalytic converter from a car is not the norm and not expected to be safe, but I bet there are some hackers who have made it work.

[0] https://ambassadorfireplaces.com/the-difference-between-cata...

Wow, either your boiler is inefficient, or your house is huge! We live in a 4 bed semi, victorian and could do with more insulation for sure - and (according to my smart meter) it is a very rare day that we spend £10 on gas for heating and hot water plus cooking.

Don't you still need to heat the rest of your house?

Inefficient boiler, yep. A medium-sized house, I would say.

I live in Edinburgh in a tenemant house with 12ft ceilings. Combine that with spiking gas prices last winter, it's a recipe for disaster.

Ouch! I can only imagine - then. I grew up in a stone built farmhouse with open coal fire in the living room and an Aga in the kitchen. Those two rooms were lovely and warm, the rest of the house not so much!

Yeah my house has sandstone walls with brick internal walls 12 foot ceilings, and a 25 year old gas boiler that isn't even a condensing boiler.

Unfortunately for us, it's also installed in a way that doesn't meet building regulations (thanks previous owners) - the flue vents onto a path that belongs to our neighbor, so if we want to upgrade the boiler we need to move it to somewhere else, and the suitable locations for it require upgrading the gas pipework in the house to a larger diameter, and pulling up the floors in all our living areas to do so.

The only spot that's "suitable" for it doesn't have room for a hot water tank either so that's more work to reroute the hot water back, and renders the spot the boiler is currently in dead space.

Last quote we got was about £15,000 all in including fixing the decorating in our office, kitchen and living room, so we decided we'd use the log burner instead for a little while. We got caught out pretty badly with this problem unfortunately

You can burn wood cleanly and very efficiently, so why not just ban inefficient stoves rather than wood burning in general? A TLUD isn't going to be any worse for your health than a gas-burning stove or furnace.

Our neighbour has a modern, top-of-the-line, highly efficient wood boiler. Still makes the area smell like a parking garage for a couple of hours each day during winter.

It's not just about the stove. It's also about the state of the wood you're burning (humidity mostly). Very dry wood burns much more cleanly than less dry wood.

In that case they aren't operating it correctly.

We should be (and are) banning those as well though, because they're bad for your health and bad for the wider communities health.

Wood smoke can also trigger asthma, so roughly 10pct of the population face a potential life-threatening situation from it. https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/triggers.html

And if the problem is because of your neighbour, there is not a lot you can do about it.

It depends very very much on the desihgn of the stove and how they are run. DEFRA in the UK has just upped the required standard of stoves that can be installed in smokeless zones. The best ones have very low emissions.

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