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

I agree with this. Walking my dog in the winter over the last 15 years feels like stepping back in times to the Victorian era. The smog and fug in the air is awful. Half the houses on my road have log burners - I hate them. Hopefully they will go out of fashion in the next few years.

My uncle is a sustainability researcher and has been saying this for years. I love wood burners and grew up with them but I think it is hard to justify, looking at the research. He calls it “recreational heating” when people are using it because we enjoy it over GCH or heat pumps. So I try to keep that phrase in mind when tempted!

It’s so ingrained in us to gather around a fire that I totally understand why the research around particulates is hard to accept.

Sir Richard Doll had similar backlash in the 1950s when he made the link between smoking and lung cancer. People absolutely did not want to hear - why? Because smoking was enjoyable and fashionable and relaxing. All the things a wood burner is.

People will wake up eventually but I appreciate it’s a tough thing to U turn on when you’ve just had one fitted or you’ve spent a load of money on one and enjoy using it. It takes time to step outside of those thoughts and think dispassionately and actually look at the evidence

How much does an air quality monitor cost?

See there's that word "may" again . . .

And quickly followed by "risk" . . .

I have an air quality monitor in the same room as the modern wood burner for this very reason.

It doesn't show any increases in VOC or particulate matter when the wood burner is being used.

However it does pick up a spike in VOC and particulates when the gas central heating comes on at 6 am (dust on radiators + heat causing the air to circulate) plus a much bigger spike in VOC when cleaning products are being used and lastly a really big spike in VOC when a Christmas Tree is first put up.

So no I'm not worried about the wood burner.

I have got a log burner and I am pregnant - am I concerned? No! if i had to list 100 things I am concerned about, having a log burner wouldn't make the list. I use kiln dried logs, my burner is serviced annually and the heat feels less harsh than central heating. In fact, every time I boost my heating I get 'cold type symptoms' and a coldsore on my nose.
Each to their own - we are adults and can make our own decisions about acceptable risks.

Completely missing the point but why would AHRC be funding science stuff? Which makes me think it’s not very robust cos humanities people tend to be humanities experts not science experts.

Yes same here, Im not concerned about it.

Children are at far greater risk from traffic and obesity.

Yeah, that's conclusive then. Group think paradox would never occur under such scrutiny would it 🤔

Child mortality has gone down in every decade. The reasons are complex, but increased awareness of risk is a big part of it. Seat belts, car seats, soft surfaces in playgrounds, and less unsupervised play (which I know has its downsides) are part of that. So when people say, we survived - well, yes most of us did. But some didn't.

The children who had open fires in the 80s would not show any signs of damage now. Many of them may never show any signs of damage. But those children will have an elevated risk of lung cancer. The numbers may be small, and other risks may be worse - but that risk is real.

This. Unfortunately some people don’t appreciate the conditions others are living in. Many communities don’t have a choice but to use this type of heating. It’s all very well someone sitting in their modern, well insulated, house with a gas supply saying “don’t burn wood, you’re harming your children”, but some families have no choice.

They're ugly monstrosities.

Because the scientists get paid to produce the results. If we paid researchers to debunk climate change, guess what the studies would say . . .

I live in a fancy area of London, and I can smell in the evening the (lovely) woodsmoke wafting down to the less fancy high rises. I think anything that adds to pollution and isn't essenital is undoubtedly selfish, just like idling a car.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Oh, I needed a laugh!

A wood stove that is used for a few months of the year isn't any danger whay so ever to anyone. You didn't grow up in the 80s did you OP . . .

Christ, kids back then even had unsupervised play times. The average Saturday was spent hanging out at the local quarry, climbing rocks, swimming in flooded mines, hanging out on street corners and back home when the street light by the chippy went on. And strangely enough, most grew up with open fires. Even more bizarre, they're mostly all still alive now.

You can get help for your anxiety. 🙄

Did you read the full article. I just did and it is very interesting. The study was done on 53 kids split across a school in Holyhead Anglesey and one in a rural village in Anglesey. There was higher particulates found by monitors in the rural school than in the urban. This COULD be due to the fact that more households in the rural area have woodburners. It also talked about other sources of rural pollution and the fuel poverty in particularly the rural area.

Posh people woodstoves are modern, well ventilated and burn lovely seasoned hardwood. I live in a rural Welsh village with lots of poverty and folks here burn what they can get their hands on to keep warm. Lots of the houses are fitted with backboilers (the fire is what heats their water) and despite grants it is still very common for wood / coal to be the main source of heating. The black smoke coming out of some of the chimneys round here is terrible.

How do you propose to fix that? If they don't light the fire they have no heat and hot water. They have no money to retro-fit central heating (our village is old and old cottages have no cavity wall insualtion or gas central heating!). We get no gas so it's expensive storage heaters or an oil fired boiler. Wood burners may be an optional extra in London suburbs but in rural North Wales they are the main / only source of heat for many and it is better to enjoy a bit of particle pollution than to freeze to death!

Trust me, it really doesn't feel OK to get cancer in your early seventies, that's a very early death these days.

It also doesn’t examine what type of wood people are using. There’s a huge difference between wet wood (often foraged at no cost), and kiln dried (below 20% moisture). Using kiln dried logs reduces particulates by up to 85%.

Equating an open fire fuelled by wet wood, with a modern stove using kiln dried logs, is not a good basis for a controlled scientific study.

We’re all going to die of something if I live to 70 in my cosy farmhouse I think I’ll be okay.

I have a wood stove, and an air quality monitor. The air quality barely changes when the stove is lit, only when it's first lit it goes up by 1. Making toast or any kind of fried food on the hob sets the alert for high PM off multiple times a day, however. New furniture sends the VOC levels sky high for a few days while it off gasses. The stove isn't an issue.

You are NBU at all OP.

There is a wealth of evidence - growing rapidly now - that wood burners are really bad news for health and the environment.

A different study this week put air pollution as number 7 on the list of modifiable risk factors for cancer. People subjected to greater levels of air pollution get more cancers. It also massively increases the risk of Alzheimer's, lung disease, heart disease, miscarriage, low birth weight and other awful health outcomes.Wood burners contribute in a large way to that.

Yet people are very resistant to accepting the scientific evidence. We've seen it on this thread, with people declaring that it must be worse to be breathing in traffic fumes in urban areas. Yes, it feels like that must be the case, but the scientific evidence shows otherwise. Yet people refuse to accept it.

I guess they don't want to.

Wood burning does feel very cosy. it's nice to sit in front of one, it feels like a treat. A comfort. In some areas, where you can pick up wood for free, it will be cheaper than running a boiler. Things like these make it hard to think about giving up.

If you have one, when you read studies like this, it's not going to make comfortable reading. There's the fact you might have spent a lot of money on it, only to find you're now feeling uncomfortable about using it. That doesn't feel good, so unless you're skilled in sitting with difficult emotions, you deny, dismiss and push it away.

Same if you're feeling guilty about what harms you might have already subjected your kids to - that feels really bad, so instead of allowing yourself to feel those difficult feelings, you deny, push them away, assume the evidence is wrong and defend and counter-attack.

It's going to take a while before the efforts to educate the public on this really land, unfortunately. Which is a pity, because people are being harmed in the meantime.

Exactly this. Posters commenting on wood burners being “middle class” is daft. Those living on Anglesey aren’t using wood burners to look good on insta. They may have no choice; it may be their only source of heating. That research article also mentions “open fires” more than once so it’s unclear whether they’ve lumped wood burners and open fires together (I haven’t read the article in great detail). Of course there’s more particulates being put into the room from open fires than stoves.

It's very much a status thing where I am... like the wood storage at the front of the house so people walking by can see you have real fires / log burners.

People get them installed when they 'do the extension'... and then post photos of their dog sitting beside the cosy fire!

It's a luxury not a necessity in London - no one needs to be burning stuff indoors to keep warm.

Perhaps I would feel differently if it was the country but in London it's highly polluting.

I would welcome a good study into the issue, this one seems to have quite a few flaws/gaps. I also question why wood burning is the only thing mentioned when lots of other things in the study were said to raise pollution.

• The sample size is tiny and from only one location.
• There is no mention of whether the fires are open, older log burner, or modern standards ones.
• Cooking with gas vs electricity is not mentioned.
• Equivalent particle emissions per unit of energy produced by power stations are not mentioned.
• It recommended cutting wood burning, but not cigarette burning, or gas fires, so implies a bias or agenda.
• It doesn't look into why people burn wood, or how to replace it. If they have no access to mains gas for a boiler, they may have no choice.

We have a log burner and have a fire every week or two. We also have solar panels and cook with electricity, not gas. I can't honestly believe that is a major issue.