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Comment by skyfaller | Hacker News Reader

To steelman your proposal, I should mention that Low-Tech Magazine thinks you're on to something, although they suggest putting the panels on the stove inside the cabin: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/05/thermoelectric-sto...

I disagree with that article for the simple reason that I do not consider burning wood to be sustainable, or healthy for anything with lungs. Wood should be used for long-lasting construction or left alone / carefully nurtured to aid our forests in rebuilding biodiversity.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/27/wood-b...

But if you're going to burn wood anyhow, perhaps thermoelectric stoves aren't a terrible way to generate electricity for yourself.

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> I disagree with that article for the simple reason that I do not consider burning wood to be sustainable, or healthy for anything with lungs. Wood should be used for long-lasting construction or left alone / carefully nurtured to aid our forests in rebuilding biodiversity.

In Northern Canada there is almost no other way. Once you are ~10minutes out of town there is no natural gas. Also note wood stoves now are double (or triple) burning with catalytic combustors that extract waaaay more heat from the wood and emit waaaay less particles in the air (because they burn it)

Most burned wood is wood unsuitable for construction. No one goes into the woods and cuts down a 200-year oak to burn in their stove.

Short lengths, widths, knots, imperfections, wood waste pressed into pellets, etc.

Although you do have a point about it being bad for air quality. Especially old stove installations.

I thought pellet stoves got hot enough to be pretty clean. Co2, yes, but not much else?

If you run it properly. A good wood stove will run cleanly as well. It’s all about the secondary combustion. An open fireplace will not get hot enough for secondary and be dirty.

Residential pellet stoves sound great but in practice they are not reliable (moving mechanical parts that operate at high temps, electronics poorly shielded from said temps—the manufacturers are pretty shady in my experience), and the cost of fuel varies quite a bit and can be very high. Compare to a wood stove that needs no electricity and can burn just about any combustible solid. Modern wood stoves are pretty efficient, too.

> but in practice they are not reliable (moving mechanical parts that operate at high temps, electronics poorly shielded from said temps

25 years ago my grandmother bought a pellet stove that lasted for 15 years with semi-regular maintenance.

Her next stove, same company, broke all the time and lasted less than 10 years, with much higher ongoing costs.

Enshitification strikes again!

In my vacation house, I’ve got a Hearthstone Heritage wood stove, neither old nor new, and I believe it has been refurbished a bit. When I ran it over Thanksgiving I put an air purifier next to it and ran it on auto. I’d been concerned about air quality with the wood stove. Pleasingly it ran on low and barely blipped when I’d open the door to add logs. Weirdly, it -would- climb up to medium if I opened the door to the garage — I guess it doesn’t like all the varnish and whatnot from there.

So anecdotally, a stove that’s not a rusty old potbelly and has a good draft seems like it could be okay for air quality.

You can sell the trunk of a 200 year oak (though often they’re hollow if they’re that old) but you will have PLENTY of good firewood left behind from harvesting it, with all the branches. The best use of a 200 year old oak is of course to let it be, the backbone of an entire ecosystem. An 80 year old walnut is another story…

It's not the wood stove owner that is exposed to the wood smoke, it's his neighbors.

"Northern Canada" -- he doesn't have any neighbours. Wood stoves are fine in such a place. They aren't fine at scale.

Here in Europe there is so much demand for wood that forests are being grown just to be cut down and turned into pellets - it's not just waste that goes into them.

Maybe it's not as bad as fossil fuels, but it still has the same issues as commercial monoculture farming, which is why there are issues with bark beetles now. And most of these forests start by tearing down old growth forests.

you're not wrong per se but no one cuts down a 200 year old oak for construction either. softwood like spruce, fir, and pine is the primary wood for construction (at least in north america).

I think a lot of these could be used for building construction, or for smaller wood objects, if we were sufficiently motivated.

For example, here is an MIT team experimenting with using forked tree branches in construction: https://energy.mit.edu/news/using-natures-structures-in-wood...

> I do not consider burning wood to be sustainable

You can't really make such a broad statement. Sure, burning wood isn't a sustainable solution for everyone everywhere, but there's plenty of situations where it's the least-worse option for heating. My parents heat their house with wood they gather from their property which mostly falls naturally. It's impractical to do anything else with it.

Perhaps they could let it decompose - releasing approximately the same amount of carbon it releases in burning - but while that might benefit the local ecosystem marginally, it would also mean they were heating their house with fossil fuels instead.

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