HIGHLIGHTING DANGER OF WOODBURNERS

Please post links to the independent verification, thanks.

I don’t have to have one, and I don’t.

if I had one I suspect I’d have no problems. However the smoke from my neighbours is causing me significant issues.

i didn’t choose to have the smoke from their chimney permeating my house every day.

this is the issue- if you have one, the smoke goes up your chimney and causes you no issues. The issues are passed on to neighbours, and who cares? As long as I’m alright jack.

likely much of the issue compared to years ago is urban housing is much denser, so more fires and more pollution. Even years ago though there were serious problems with fossil fuel fires- London smog and all that. There’s a reason smokeless zones were brought in.

my house was built in the 1800’s, fwiw, seeing as you’re such a snob about period houses.

In my rural part of the world most houses use wood burning stoves. We have to really, we get fairly regular power cuts in winter, so a back up heat source that does not require a pump and therefore electricity is a necessity. I am not aware of anyone having any health issues or any complaints having ever been made. That being said, we know how to use a log burner and only use dry wood. The Times did some research on this a while ago and found that scented candles gave off far more particles.

“I'll never understand why people can't say I see the evidence but I'm going to do it anyway. Instead of, my opinions render evidence meaningless.”

@Aberentian, 100% this ^

Meanwhile outdoors?

Outdoors is fine. We're hugely spread out where I am. The autumn plant waste fires put a lot more smoke into the valley.

This is my thoughts.
Coal fires growing up no health issues .
Grandparents lived to 70/80s it was smoking that tooke them.

Otter grandparents both died young due to two different health conditions and used gas fires

Is it just log fires that the issue is or open/multi fuel stoves ?
I don’t think the Risks are any different to before.

This is just a scare tactic to get everyone in line .
Picking on a small majority to look like they are doing something for the environment . .

This is giving me "my Gran smoked and lived till 96" vibes 😂

Living in cold, damp conditions is also very bad for your health - and that is how we'd be living if we didn't have the rayburn and stove lit.

I do have to put up with the pollution of others having them though, they stink.

And? If you don’t like them, you don’t have to have one. It sounds like your house isn’t a period house anyway.

The problem is when people burn wood that isn't properly dried. If it's been left outside or isn't properly seasoned then the smoke can be horrendous. We used to have some not very bright next door neighbours who would leave their wood out in their porch to get wet and then put it straight on the fire - the smoke was horrendous! Fortunately they couldn't be bothered to light it very often and soon moved out.
Everyone has fires around here, it's not ideal but it is what it is, we don't have mains gas as an option and are too far from the road for oil delivery. So it's fires or hideously expensive electric heating.
I grew up with open fires as a child so it's probably too late for me to be saved anyway!

I live rurally in a not particularly new house. We're electric only. It's not cheap. I still hate pollution generating burners and coal fires.

Why is someone an oddball for caring about pollution though?

It's the bonfires that annoy me. All the houses have large gardens with plenty of room for composting and there are also garden waste collections yet people feel the need to have massive smokey bonfires on hot summer evenings when you want the windows open or to sit in the garden. Personally I think they need to be banned both for public health and environmental reasons.

Hell could literally freeze over before I would give up my open fire. It is one of the greatest pleasures in the world. I often find people that are driving this initiative live in a new(ish) build in the suburbs and think everyone lives like they do.

Sorry but this simply isn't true. Particulate emissions can minimized under absolutely perfect conditions but not eliminated.

Thank you.
But you do know nobody here will listen, because they think they have the right to poison their neighbour's families.

I'm 60, we are smoked out by our neighbour's woodburning stove which is lit 365 days a year.
I have asthma, I need to use a steroid inhaler twice a day just to stay alive, but we can't have windows open even in July/August heat, because at 6 o'clock every evening their woodburner will be belching out smoke. We have to go indoors and shut all windows, we can't sit in our garden any more to enjoy summer evenings.

We complained to the environmental health dept but they came out to check, during the day when the thing wasn't belching smoke into our garden, and they told us there was no problem.

Even if these things can't be banned altogether their use should be restricted to the colder months when fewer people are spending time outdoors.

And before anyone tells me to "just move somewhere else", we can't afford to - we are a low income household because I can't work due to my disabilities and our house needs a lot of work done before it would be sellable. So we are trapped and have come to dread the summer evenings.

We have some oddball that posts similar every year on the village fb site and delivers leaflets to houses she sees with smoke coming out of the chimney.
Guess where the leaflets go...🔥

When my neighbours have their fire on the whole street, including our house and garden, stinks. We live in a slightly more built up part of an overall rural area.

Probably.
We still get the 'granny smoked 400 a day and didn't die until she was 175' brigade too.

The echo chamber is the 'I like them so I'm ignoring the pollution' group.

So perhaps this is a wider argument about pollution in built up neighbourhoods and applying it universally is incorrect and short sighted when considering not everyone has access to gas heating - which is also bad for the environment and electrical heating bar new underfloor heating which again is often inaccessible is ineffective. In some places wood is free and available after storms with barely 0 transport emissions making it overall the best environmental heating solution and the only one available for some.

Quicker to use my brain than look stuff up and then type it out in my own words, but ta v much for the compliment you didn't think you were giving.

And average life expectancy would be lower with all those things to skew the figures.

I forgot about the smoking and lung damage post WWI gas attacks and other disabilities/affecting men (mostly) and occupational hazards. But it was late.

And coal. What do you think caused the peasouper thick fogs in London - burning fuel in open fires.

They are massively polluting in built up areas where lots of people own them.