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

Excellent post @Fantaorage . Attitudes will change but slowly. Smoking cigarettes was believed to be good for your health for a very long time. It was only when they looked for a cause for the rising number of people with lung cancer that the research showed how dangerous tobacco smoke was. Huge numbers of people claimed it never did them any harm for a long time. Thank goodness most people now accept the irrefutable evidence.

It affects the neighbours too.

The thing is, once kiln dried logs have been stored outside and exposed to damp they are no longer dry when burned.

Think you should have said; could be in the house……fire out.??

There are also other fuels which people use in their homes which emit dangerous micro particles & noxious gasses, especially notable is Natural Gas.
Humans have been living close to smoky fires since time began!!, why spend money on scientists looking into natural wood smoke when we’re surrounded by huge quantities of unnatural present day particulates.
As the particulates weren’t identified in this study, I cannot understand why you have reached the conclusion of your post.

YABU for being so invested in what other people choose to do.

We are not able to access mains gas (along with hundreds and hundreds of households near us, we are rural but not isolated at all).

We have underfloor electric heating in a small extension - the heat doesn't transmit to anywhere else

We have oil fired ch in another part of the house/bedrooms. We have to pay upfront for a tank of oil and it is eye watering lying expensive. We use it sparingly. As I said up thread the emissions from that boiler stink and seem more concerning to me.

We have solar panels and a way of heating water from them but it is temperamental and no one really seems to understand how it is meant to work.

We have 2 fireplaces downstairs in the main living areas and these effectively heat most of the house very quickly and easily when lit

IMO woodburners are the aluminium pans of the 1970's. Someone did research into what causes Alzheimers and the wondered if there was a connection to using aluminium cookware. It was bever proven in fact it was actually disproven, but hundreds of millions of people believe it to this day.

Where we live, everyone around us has woodburners, including both our next door neighbours. One of the neighbours is a bungalow and we're a house, so the pipe from their recently installed burner delivers billows of smoke straight at 2 of our upstairs windows, including the bathroom. We have to use a dehumidifier now, as we can't open that window without the house filling with smoke. They use their woodburner for 18 hours a day. Even with all our windows shut, smoke gets in. The only way I can air the house is to get up at 4 in the morning. If you go outside, it's like standing in the middle of a bonfire. So because people enjoy woodburners, our standard of living and no doubt our health go down the drain. There should definitely be a law against these things. Why is it fine to do this to other people, and how is the NHS going to cope with the consequences (it isn't).
Woodburners seem to be like holidays abroad by plane - people like them, so fuck the consequences, including the consequences for their own children. Both our next door neighbours and my sister bought their woodburners quite recently, after there'd been masses of warnings in the papers. They just don't care.

There are still open fires in rural Wales including Anglesey.

Also FYI: Great Britain has the highest percentage of people with respiratory problems in Europe.
Wood burners, badly insulated and ironically also badly ventilated houses ( causing mould), and a high percentage of smokers will do that.

Do you have other heating?

I have a wood burner. I use it every night when it’s cold. I only use well seasoned wood. I also use an air purifier when it’s on - and as another poster said it reads low pollution - but use the toaster or gas hob and it has high readings. I have an electric car and my child walks to school so I try and be everything in moderation when it comes to my pollution load.

So are you saying that it is unreasonable for children to be in a house that has a log burner, at any time, regardless of when it was lit or is alight?

It is the presence of or the recent use rather than the active use that is the issue?

My dc spend lots of time at home but that may not necessarily be when then stove is lit. I try to light it early so that they come home to a warm house, but none of us sleep well if too hot so we don't burn into the evening.

And our stoves have never been in use for 16-20 hours out of 24.

What are the comparative studies of risk of harm from cold and damp vs wood burners?

As a parent the thought of deliberately not heating the house despite the means to do so seems more immediately harmful but maybe I've been brainwashed by my caveman ancestors need for flame.

I totally agree with you. My DH was one of the people carrying a backpack in a similar Danish study and because we had visited my parents one single afternoon he won the game of "who had most dangerous particles in his filter" for the local group of test people. He "won" over a guy who lived on the most polluted street in Copenhagen (H.C. Andersens Boulevard).

As others have said, many of the posts on this thread are absolutely textbook examples of denial, deflection and distraction. Psychologically fascinating.

But agree that as a society we should focus on where the risks are highest - which I think in this context is open fires, people whose only source of heat/cooking is burning wood, and burning dangerous crap. As far as I can tell there is ZERO enforcement of the Clean Air Acts.

If councils were funded to carry out surveys and fine people who used open fires/woodburners illegally, or burnt unsuitable materials, that would make a massive difference. There should also be a campaign to make clear that open fires are REALLY bad for people, especially babies and small children, and ideally government funding to support poor households relying on open fires to install safer forms of heating.

The people I bought my house from had an open fire which they used regularly, despite having small children and being in a smoke control zone. Appalling. I can only imagine that they just did not understand the health or legal risks, so we need an advertising campaign to make the facts clear.

So, it’s like parking your car in the living room with the engine running, but with the car in a sealed chamber vented to a chimney.

What a daft analogy.

This. The hand-held monitors that you can buy yourself are not very accurate at all. Measuring particulate accurately is very hard. I know this as I am an air quality scientist.

and being patronising is not a good look

I live in one of these areas, wood burners everywhere!

I think this is where some nuance is required too.

Very few people burn wood for 16 hours a day, every day, all year. And if it is only really this sort of consistent exposure that causes concern then the people you hate with 'hobby fires' are probably the least of the problem bearing very few of the negative impacts?

In most they are not allowed
https://www.gov.uk/smoke-control-area-rules

YANBU OP and louder for those at the back!!

Find the cognitive dissonance issue on this to be crazy. The research seems clear.

We stopped using our wood burning stove quite a few years ago when we first came across the studies and nothing I've read since then had convinced me I'm wrong. I miss the coziness of course but there are other ways to replicate it.

Gas cookers are not great either. That's something I'd like to change at some point - but I do have to cook, whereas I don't have to have a wood burner on. It's an uncomfortable truth.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/28/pollutants-from-gas-stoves-kill-40000-europeans-each-year-report-finds

I also look to minimise use of aerosols, air fresheners, candles, perfumes etc - none of them is great for us or our kids.

Limitations:

"Lastly, while contextual data helped identify likely pollution sources, source-specific quantification (e.g. distinguishing between cooking, smoking, or wood burning) was not feasible."

"Reliance on self-reported data, including post-survey responses and time-activity logs, introduces potential recall bias, especially among younger participants."

Conclusion:
"Overall, the results demonstrate that adults’ heating, ventilation, and smoking practices have a greater impact on children’s exposure than the children’s own activities or location."

Thhey also did not distinguish between types of fuel burners, which included stoves and open fireplaces, or between types of fuel used. This wasn't mentioned in their limitations but should have been.

So basically, there were confounding variables that they did not control. Perfectly reasonable as they indicated that in their limitations that that was the case. However, as it often the case with the media, they jumped on what they considered to be an interpretation likely to attract views and misrepresented the research.

I'm not saying the research isn't valid (it is, plus it's published in a well regarded journal in the field). However, what I am saying is if you are going to start a thread, you should base it on the published article rather than a newspapers picking and choosing and potentially misinterpreted/exaggerated reports.

My reading of the paper is that the research is interesting and suggests further research using larger numbers that also controls the confounding variables is necessary.

I'm getting a bit sick of being told what to do or not to do on MN.
Don't buy from Shein, don't go on holiday, not don't use a woodburner.
You do you, but you have no right to tell anyone else what to do. I guess you are getting a smug kick from parading your superior behaviour on a public forum though, which I expect is the real point here.