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

I know that coal fires make my chest bad, and have avoided any form of open fire for that reason. Then wood burners became popular and I find I have the same reaction. Not just indoors, but outdoors too and I can smell them as soon as I exit our house.

I was always suspicious of gas hobs and apparently they are also big pollutants. And yes cars, particularly left ticking over cause me the same issues.

We do have gas central heating but I guess BC it vents outside it's not as bad.

But I do sympathise with those using wood burners to get warm and cosy when fuel prices are ridiculous..Just do it with the knowledge you are polluting your lungs and your families lungs too.
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I think it very much depends on what's burned. My neighbour's chimney churns out smelly smoke because he's not very bright and he burns plastic and wet wood! But if you burn dry wood you won't have smelly fires. But re. the particulates, surely if you keen the door shut then you won't be breathing them in? They'll be escaping into the air outside, of course. But it's mostly car fumes I can smell outside.

But it’s just so nice isn’t it?!

This thread has inspired to me use my air quality monitor. Woodburner in our sitting room has been going for hours, as well as 2 3 wick candles. I put the monitor close to the fireplace.

Air pollution level 001 (fresh)
HCHO 0.002
TVOC 0.010
PM2.5 0.03

About as good as you can get 😊

And that's great, you'll be releasing fewer dangerous particles. Not everyone does though.

@gaspanic How would you suggest it is policed?

In my log shed are logs cut from a sallow we took down in May '23, logs from an ash tree taken down in March'25, and kindling taken from a 120 year old roof. There is also a stack of wood from a hazel cut about 3 weeks ago.

The ash & hazel aren't fit to burn now, but in two years they will be. It's not bad wood, just not seasoned yet.

Anyone checking what I burn would have to check each log as I put it in the burner. Which obviously isn't going to happen.

That's why we use a moisture meter.

The fire on the TV is best

YANBU. There is no reason for people to use them in the centrally-heated densely populated inner city area I live in, yet people do because it's 'nice' and 'natural' and 'sustainable' (no they aren't, not in most contexts). Each winter my clothes would reek just walking around my area for a couple of minutes. Before I realised how bad they are for health (YES, even the new 'clean burning' ones) I couldn't work out why I had a tight chest and post nasal drip all winter and couldn't get up the stairs at work without getting out of breath. Then I found out and bought massive HEPA air purifiers for our bedrooms. Haven't had a tight chest any winter since and luckily fewer people around here seem to be using woodburners now.

I do think if you are living in a densely populated urban area with central heating, and using a wood burner frequently just cos it's "pretty and cosy" then you are an inconsiderate polluting twat.

However, demonising them and banning them will greatly impact rural populations that really aren't causing the (urban) problem and they would otherwise be using expensive and polluting oil heating anyway. Urban people who have a real fire twice a year aren't the issue either.

It's not fair to just say "woodburners are bad".

My wood burner is fine - no smoke gets into the room as it goes up the chimney, and once it's at temperature the particulates themselves get combusted - you won't actually see any smoke coming out of the flue.
My air purifier doesn't react to it, even when I open the door to add a log.
So I'm very happy to continue using it.

I come from Denmark and we lived in the West Midlands for ten years. Definitely less cold and damp than Denmark!
Though I will acknowledge that we have not had rain 36 days in a row like I just saw in a British newspaper that some of you had. My condolences.

Great. Can you tell me what these are?

For those of us without a gas supply. I keep hearing it said but what are they?

We had one in our old house (in London) and I loved it, though it produced so much heat that we could only use it on the coldest days. But knowing now what we do, I wouldn’t put one into my new house, lovely though they are.

Yes, there's nothing wrong with the paper. It's a bit of a stretch to use it to bash woodburners as evil killers of our children though.

There are many sources of pollution. People without woodburners still light bonfires and fireworks, drive a car (and electric cars still produce particulates from tire wear), heat their homes, cook their dinner etc..

And yet we are still here and healthy. The vast majority of my family live well into old age and far past the life expectancy of their peers.

This is an interesting report. It says that daily variation in PM2.5 is mostly from heating and cooking, so I guess we should all stop that immediately.

uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat11/1212141150_AQEG_Fine_Particulate_Matter_in_the_UK.pdf

You can find out who funded the research by downloading the PDF of the journal article (it's free) from the second link in the OP. Under "Funding" we find "This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/Y003772/1]".

Googling that grant number finds this page which describes what would probably be called an "umbrella grant" of £6,483,019 to Flora Samuel as "Principal Investigator" (as it's called). She is also the final name in the list of authors on the paper, which is standard in the social sciences as a way of signalling that she is the senior academic.

So it's all fairly worthy stuff, which most people (apart from perhaps full-on cartoonish climate change deniers of the "My Dad smoked 60 a day and it never did him any harm" variety) would find unobjectionable. The lead author is a postdoctoral researcher at Cardiff, so this was quite a serious level of work. But without preregistration of the project to say what they were looking for, it's hard to draw many conclusions about the extent to which wood burners cause harm. I suspect that the initial focus of the study may have been PM2.5 in general, and they may have decided to focus on the wood burner aspect when trying to find a core topic for the article that they wanted to submit to a journal.

Clearly it's "better" to be in a room without an active wood burner than with one, but we knew that already. A lot of science is about quantifying and reducing uncertainty rather than coming up with bright-line demarcations into "safe" and "unsafe". I'm not sure that we've even learned a lot in that sense either from this study, but I think it's interesting from the citizen-scientist point of view.

Yes its interesting isn't it. I fell down a rabbit hole of airborne particulates 😂

"Domestic" isn't just woodburner stoves though, it's probably an everything else category - bonfires, fireworks etc... I wonder what else is included..?

Oh dear I might fall down another hole..🐇

But they haven't targetted woodburners at all.

They have targetted cars through with ever stricter emission standards and clean air zones. If you ripped the cat off a car it would fail its mot and you would probably get prosecuted.

Whereas with woodburners people can still seemingly pump out as much crap as they want by burning unsuitable wood and don't have to pay a penalty for it.

Thousands of complaints and nothing being done about it.

Those of us who live with somebody with a severe lung condition DO stop using many of those things as well. Witnessing an immediate severe struggle for breath tends to make the scientific evidence land very inescapably. It certainly makes it far less easy to deny.

I guess if you're lucky enough to have healthy lungs now, it's a lot easier to poo-poo the evidence on wood burners and other causes of harmful air pollution, as paying it proper attention means making inconvenient changes now, when the health issues probably won't make themselves known for a few decades.

A bit like how hard it is to get people to exercise, drink less, eat healthily and not smoke when they're young and feeling invincible, and the thought of cancer in 40 years time just doesn't touch the sides.

I have an interest in this because of DH's health, so I've been following the science for some time now. It's pretty incontrovertible. From what I hear from somebody I know who campaigns on this for one of the big health charities, it is the government who are dragging their feet on cracking down on wood burning, because of concerns for those in rural areas who have fewer other choices, rather than them wanting people to stop doing it.

I think changing public perception of this, and their behaviours, is a long-haul endeavour, and what's far more likely is that councils will increasingly crack down on it, until we have a situation where everywhere apart from the most rural areas will have a ban in place.

that report is interesting “domestic” is level with road transport for some particulate sizes?

I know right. I wish people would read past the headline.

Given these same particles are given off by burning toast or cooking bacon, I think we also need to close all greasy spoons, MacDonalds and take aways.

We get annoyed by things like this because many of us don't have an alternative way to heat our homes. We have no gas supply. I could use oil but I'm not convinced either burning that or the kids breathing in fumes from the tank in the garden would be better.

My kids have been brought up in front of one. No one in the house has ever had a chest infection, non of us are asthmatic. House is battered by the north sea so more exchange of air than I would like!

Why can't they study air quality in a set place and compare. I don't understand how wandering around with a back pack can give you results to compare.