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Comment by zh3 | Hacker News Reader

In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down.

Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.

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I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it.

But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\

What about a really loud fire alarm outside your house, that goes off whenever it detects even a slight amount of smoke?

Yep, you could point out that the purpose of the alarm is to notify you to close your windows, not to annoy the smoker.

"Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke, and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygen from a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his or her cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur."

- Hackers, Steven Levy, 1984

People who smoke on the balconies of multi-unit buildings are awful people. It’d be a beautiful day but I can’t keep my windows open because there’s always somebody smoking to make my unit smell disgusting if I just want to enjoy a cool breeze going through.

Thank goodness smoking is becoming rarer here and is no banned pretty much everywhere indoors and near entrances.

I don’t mind if people have a vice (I’ve got mine) but keep me out of it.

Smoking tobacco got rarer here, but smoking marijuana has gotten much more common. I don't know if it's just that I grew up with tobacco, but the skunk-like smell of marijuana bothers me a lot more.

I didn’t even mention tobacco specifically because it’s the same either way.

It makes me a little sad to see a lot of peoples comments here about how they're annoyed by xyz thing someone does that doesn't stop at there fence line or unit. So many are being downvoted.

XYZ thing? ... No it's not XYZ thing. It's smoke which directly impacts the health of my family and the enjoyment of our home.

Want to cancer yourself and stink to high heaven? Absolutely 100% fine by me.

Just don't drag anyone else into it.

I had this problem ... a smoker who would religiously sit on their patio and smoke so much that it would smoke us out of our house.

After speaking with them didn't help ... my next response was to religiously water the garden at the same time with my jet spray ...

I have amusing videos (from our CCTV) of our neighbour regularly diving for cover from an "accidental" spray of water.

"Sorry. I'm just watering our plants, sorry about that".

I wish I could say this solved it ... but the subtlety of the point that their smoking was impacting the enjoyment of our home, in the same way as my water spray was impacting his enjoyment of his garden was lost on them ...

We eventually settled it the old fashioned way. Not with pistols or swords ... but an old-fashioned chat after reporting them to the local council.

Luckily the problem is resolved ... but largely due to the threat of the Council taking action against their landlord.

The only solution is leverage ...

No smokers in my neighborhood, but people use their goddamn fireplaces too much and it’s kinda impossible to get fresh air in winter evenings and often during the day. Not sure how to train them. And unfortunately, there are too many. Burning wood should be forbidden in residential areas. It’s similar to smoking in restaurants, except you can’t escape them.

My romantic views of wood smoke hit reality when I first camped in Canada's Banff-Jasper national parks, where you could buy unlimited firewood for the night for $5. Everyone bought it, it seemed. Trying to breathe downwind of a campground was a rude wakeup call. It should definitely be restricted in denser residential areas. I can't imagine some of the towns in Germany or Poland where residents depend on wood fires for heat.

Where they depend on wood for heat they are more likely to have efficient stoves that completely burn the wood. Smoke coming out of the chimney is "firing for the crows" and wasting fuel.

People should just make better fires.

A good fire doesn't release much, if any smoke. It burns it up instead.

A good woodstove is worth the money.

People have romantic ideas about heating with fire and burn the most awful green wood in their fireplaces, stinking up the whole neighborhood. I understand burning bad wood because you have no options -- I witnessed a chimney fire or two as a kid that resulted from burning too much wet pine -- but I cannot fathom the mindset of someone who does it recreationally.

Meanwhile my neighbor is burning wood he stacked eight years ago.

Some of it precious, too. Like black walnut.

The stink remains even for efficient fires. Smoke is often correlated of course.

I'm in Christchurch, New Zealand which gets winter smog,. The city council enforces rules and woodburners need to meet strict emission standards. They regularly tighten the rules so that if you want a woodburner you need to replace it every 15 years or so.

But they do still smell.

The rules have radically improved the air quality here and we now get much less smog than when I was a kid.

Outright banning open fires and coal years ago made a big difference too.

I'm not sure what happens if you don't follow the rules. A neighbour can make a complaint and there will get taken seriously and I believe they have a van sometimes checking too. Although I've personally never heard of anyone actually getting caught.

>They regularly tighten the rules so that if you want a woodburner you need to replace it every 15 years or so.

What's that supposed to achieve? Also what do you do if you build your own woodburner/fireplace?

No one is forcing you to get/build one that doesn't far exceed the current regulations to the point where it is expected to exceed them until the end of its useful lifespan.

What do you mean? A fireplace can last far far longer than that timespan and it's efficiency is not tied to it's age.

If you don't want to replace it after 15 years, buy one that will pass emissions for the next 30 years.

And the certification will cost almost nothing and take into account everything i presume? Or will it center around the ones you can buy in a shop of the shelf like most regulation and be ridiculously prohibitive for everyone that goes off the beaten path?

It achieves cleaner air, which I personally like, and which is especially great for anyone with lung problems like asthmatics.

I suspect part of the rule tightening is to slowly squeeze to get rid of fires altogether (the outcome with the cleanest air).

> what do you do if you build your own woodburner/fireplace?

You couldn't afford to do it legally (I expect emissions testing is expensive). I don't know what the penalties are for illegal woodburners/fireplaces. My personal experience is that it isn't enforced. I'd guess penalties can be avoided unless you're a repeat offender with a complaining neighbour.

Note that outdoor braziers are legal AFAIK. Although Outdoor fires have some restrictions - especially if very dry and high fire risk.

Firewood is not cheap for heating. Even if you have free trees then it costs a lot of time (in my experience) and often equipment or transport is expensive too.

Here's some historical data that shows very significant improvement over 25 years: https://www.ecan.govt.nz/your-region/your-environment/air-qu...

The smog was horrific before 2000 when those statistics start. Apparently low air quality was implicated in many deaths per year here.

>You couldn't afford to do it legally (I expect emissions testing is expensive).

An honest answer at least and something i hope we don't see here. But I think similar legislation is going to become common trough the EU (something is already on the books i believe) and is already a thing in Germany.

It's silly too in a time when most still heat with fossil fuels, pumping up more and more that could be avoided and i can build a fireplace with outside air intake or get a damn near ancient finish masonry heater that's far more efficient than anything one can get at the store.

>Firewood is not cheap for heating. Even if you have free trees then it costs a lot of time (in my experience) and often equipment or transport is expensive too.

I live in Western Europe but it's been cheap. If I counted up the time invested and compared it to equivalent time worked for money to spend on other heating with fossil fuels then it comes out far far cheaper. Even if i add some egregious estimates for the cost of a chainsaw, trailer and wheelbarrow it's still only a fraction of the cost.

> when most still heat with fossil fuels

Christchurch doesn't use much fossil fuels. Coal, Coal gas[1], Coke, and LPG were used in the past for home heating. Electricity generation can come from coal when hydro lakes get dry. Utility Solar will replace that usage.

I use firewood for heating when I'm using the living area but I'm not sure I'd replace the current woodburner. I currently use gas for hot water for showers but LPG is getting more expensive so when the gas califont fails it will be replaced with electric heating.

I have access to free trees, but I've been slowly finding that my "free" firewood is expensive (because I value my time highly). I'm not sure how to account for the risks of hurting myself, or the benefits of exercise!

We had a massive problem with smog, and although the regulations definitely have some bad side effects, the regulations have worked.

[1] https://www.engineeringnz.org/programmes/heritage/heritage-r...

We have a very nice Jotul stove that we use occasionally during winter to supplement our minisplits (e.g. when it drops to -10C or colder overnight). I've been told it's one of the best wood stoves you can buy.

But we burn Siberian Elm wood that grows (and dies) on our property, and even when the stove is working at its best ... jeez, I feel embarrassed for how much we stink up the neighborhood. Burning elm wood is just inherently nasty in terms of the smell.

It's particularly embarrassing because a lot of neighbors use pinon in their stoves and that makes parts of the village basically like walking into a cafe with the best smelling chili you've ever eaten (while remaining outside!).

I cannot fathom making this comparison.

100% agree, many people don’t realize just how harmful wood smoke is. It’s also the main source of pollution in the Bay Area during the winter. Unfortunately energy costs are high enough here that people resort to burning wood to save money, so collectively beneficial policies are likely to face resistance (understandably).

The purpleair map has been awesome to at least make the problem visible. I hope they are using it to aid enforcement on spare the air days.

The atmosphere above Christchurch, NZ tends to form layers in winter that trap the smoke and make this worse, and new fireplaces have been restricted to clean-burning log burners and dry wood by law.

It seemed like the biggest change in air quality in recent years came from the tragic earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 knocking down all the unreinforced-masonry chimneys, though.

Why would anyone burn anything but dry wood in their indoor fireplace...

Because all they have is wet wood and they want to light the fire.

If you had dry wood to hand of course you'd use that in preference.

Burning wood is acutally forbidden in many cities in France for this very reason.

> people use their goddamn fireplaces too much and it’s kinda impossible to get fresh air in winter evenings

Not a problem with a properly designed HEATAS approved wood burning stove and properly seasoned beach wood.

Being daft enough to buy an inefficient, unapproved stove and/or and burn unseasoned green wood is ridiculous. Not to mention its illegal to sell small quantities of unseasoned firewood in Blighty; large amounts to season yourself are fine.

EDIT: If you disagree with the above, then get off your arse and write a rebuttal saying why! Downvoting simply because you disagree (rather than because the text doesn't add to the conversation) simply turns arguments into a popularity contest and is turning this place into another Reddit. (A statement of fact, no matter what the old HN guidelines say about Reddit).

Well, it's not the burning of the wood as such, but the lack of flue gas treatment. I too wish we had much stricter imissions rules for fires in residential areas.

We had a similar problem and used to spray those air freshener sprays towards the source of the smoke whenever we noticed it. The advantage is that those sprays can travel downwards unlike other sources of smell (our neighbor lived below us). And they can be quite strong and linger. And depending on your local laws, you can't just pollute the air with anything you choose, but it's hard to argue against air freshener ("I just wanted my smoke filled balcony to smell nice!"). Whether it worked for us, no, not really, I don't think the neighbor was even sensitive to strong smells.You could hypothetically build some kind of smoke detection system that would automate this, but I think any cigarette smoke detectors won't work better on outside air than your nose.

Reminds me of Amelie's revenge in the movie.

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