To say don't use a wood burner if you have children in the house?

Lots of layers of problems, google results below

Britain’s high rate of respiratory issues despite lower smoking levels is primarily driven by significant health inequalities, high levels of deprivation, and exposure to environmental pollutants. While smoking remains a factor, historically high smoking rates, poor housing, pollution, and lack of investment in lung health, particularly in deprived areas, contribute to the burden.

• Health Inequalities and Deprivation: Respiratory diseases like COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) are heavily linked to socioeconomic deprivation. Residents in the most deprived areas are significantly more likely to die from lung conditions.
• Environmental Factors and Air Quality: Poor air quality is the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK. Long-term exposure to pollutants—often higher in deprived, urban areas—causes chronic respiratory conditions.
• Historical Smoking Trends: Although smoking rates are falling, the damage from historical smoking is long-lasting, with many currently suffering from diseases developed over decades.
• Housing and Workplace Exposure: Poor housing conditions, including damp and mould, and prolonged exposure to dust or fumes in certain industries contribute to chronic lung damage.
• Regional Disparities: Specific areas, particularly in the North East and in industrial cities like Liverpool and Manchester, show much higher rates of respiratory, emergency admissions, often correlating with higher smoking rates and lower income levels in those regions.

It is the accumulated effect that is dangerous. In Britain, you also have exposure to the exhaust from cars, chemicals in toys, furniture, and clothing, mould in the houses, and then there is the high amount of multiprocessed food consumed in Britain. (In 2006 Britain had 40% of Europe's consumption of fast food.)

Because the accumulated effect is what damages the body, you cannot really use the official limitations to define when something is dangerous to you. If you live in a well-built house (with no mould) in a forest, don't smoke, grow your own food, and are hardly ever around cars, then the damage from burning wood in your fireplace will not affect you to the same degree as if you live in a damp flat in a city, smoke, and mainly eat multiprocessed food.

The fact is that Britain has the highest percentage of people with respiratory problems in Europe, and refusing to acknowledge the issues that cause this problem is only going to make the problem worse.

I decided to get a monitor for air quality after reading all the pearl clutching on threads like this about how dangerous they were inside the house (and outside but obviously I cant test that) and how if the quality is monitored I would see what harm it was doing

I thought let me get one and check it out, perhaps Im wrong

I see no impact on the air quality with the burner, only when I have the gas hob on (which is quite far away from the monitor) or burning stuff sometimes like toast or candles

When Ive therefore said this on threads suddenly its 'oh well they dont work anyway in the home'

Yet Im sure if I said 'oh it showed terrible readings and I had to stop using my burner' everyone would think its very accurate and informative

Strange that.

Wow,you couldn’t come up with a credible argument so just decided youd say air monitors are useless.

it doesn’t come across well.

It's actually quite difficult to monitor air quality effectively and I suspect most of the consumer grade internal monitors on sale are cheap rubbish that don't really work.

Or maybe they do work in the respect they give the answer that people want to have.

Alanis?

But there is quite a difference in terms of exposure isn't there? Between an African woman whose only way of cooking or heating across their entire life course is an open fire burning recently foraged wood (or indeed anything combustable they can find) and a middle class European using a modern log burner with door, chimney and seasoned quality logs occasionally? Things are dose dependent too?

It's like saying that people die from liver failure from paracetamol overdoses so you should never expose your body to paracetamol, or similarly inaccurate extrapolations.

Everything has nuance and our exposure and appetite for risk varies. Exaggeration, hyperbole and unfounded absolutely help no one.

Yes, humans have cooked over an open fire for thousands of years, and cooking over an open fire is what causes so many cases of lung cancer in women in Africa. It is not healthy, nor "natural" no matter how many thousands of years people have been doing it.
And yes, the particles are still in the house after the fire is out. They are in the dust and get into the air again when we walk around, sit down etc.

OP, we dont have heating. Our wood burner IS our heating.

Not everyone is a townie.

Internal air monitors sound great.

Are the air monitors also outside the house so you can reassure the neighbours it has no impact on them?

And as for joy, smoking gives many smokers joy.

Nothing will change, OP, everyone with a wood burner has their own compelling reasons for using one.

Make it make sense

..... right now my children are outside collecting the wood (from the wood store full of home grown (but properly seasoned) wood in the garden) for me to burn in our stove tonight!

The irony.

(They also cut kindling with an axe)

(I can't watch call the midwife without a fire)

Such ridiculous hyperbole

I get more joy out of a wood burner of an evening than the central heating.
This has value too.

I do think dome people think anyone with a wood burner is just clueless and some are, there are clueless people everywhere, but many of us burn seasoned wood, ensure the seals on our stoves are optional, monitor air quality and use purifiers, so no exactly what we are dealing with, my air is clean. I’ve expensive units in each room that monitor and ensure it, there is also minimal smoke from the chimney, nothing can be smelled and it’s very pale coloured, almost white and I live semi rurally, I have kids in the house regularly and raised my own with them,

compare that with a couple I know who can’t afford to heat their home properly and their clothes smell of damp in winter, and sadly so does their babies, then a fire is much better than the condensation dampness as a living condition. And that’s before we get into the issues of air quality in electricity and gas production for central heating, or trains, cars, trucks etc.

wood burners managed correctly are the least of the issues.

I have an air quality monitor, 4 metres from my wood burning and if the door is closed then it doesn't register any changes in PM2.5.

It does however show an increase in PM2.5 when the gas central comes on at 6am with the heat causing household dust to rise.

How did you air test pls? I’d like to do this

Yes that's what I said - once the wood burner is hot.

I'm in a very remote rural area anyway so I'll continue to enjoy mine guilty free, especially wity the evidence of very clean air all around me in the form of mosses and lichens.

Not really. It is the Daily Mail after all.

And they did slag off a friend of mine in their despicable rag once.

I’m in Yorkshire and lots of coal use due to coal pensions.

Lack of visible smoke does not mean toxic particles are not being emitted, just that you can't see them. Modern eco burners are more efficient but still produce fine particles (pm 2.5) carbon monoxide, benzene, nitrogen oxides etc.
Secondary combustion does occur but only once the first logs have burned and have reached a high enough temperature.

Unfortunately it's people like your neighbour giving the rest of us a bad name, and risking a ban.

You sound like you're doing everything right though.

My two nearest neighbours actually burn coal, but tbf we're very spread out and unless they completely renovated, or freeze, they have little choice really. But even they mostly produce whiteish smoke.

These posts are so wearisome. I’ve two wood burners, both defra approved modern ones, I use seasoned wood and I’ve hepa filter air purifiers by each air in my house is likely cleaner than yours and what’s outside. The only time particles come in the room is when I open the door to load it, at which point the air purifiers immediately ramp up and remove it. The door isn’t opened much as I know how fk use them.

honeslty just so wearisome.

Ok, thank you.
Yes, I've purposely stood outside our house to look at the chimney when our log burner is on, multiple times in fact, and I cannot see any smoke coming out of our chimney. So what you've explained helps me to understand.
We have a new DEFRA approved eco log burner and use kiln dried wood only. I know some advice states that even these are still not safe. But when people talk about smoke billowing from chimneys, or even worse the smell of smoke or burning wood in the actual room, I can't relate to this. We have no chimney smoke. And absolutely zero smoke or smell of burning of any kind in our lounge where the burner is or anywhere in our house. Even when I open the door to add more wood, no smoke escapes; the wood is on fire but it is not smoking.
Conversely, my next door neighbour has an old wood burner, not DEFEA approved, works as a carpenter, and brings loads of wood panels, skirting boards, doors, etc. home in his van and cuts it all up to burn. His wife is forever going on about how brilliant it is that they never have to pay for their wood, and their chimney billows out dark grey smoke every evening, and smells terrible.

For me the real question is using processed wood pellets from waste wood better than that waste wood going straight to an industrial incinerator.