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

Maybe check out what effect lead has on peoples brains.

Well a wood burner is enclosed with a glass door so why aren't you targeting open fires? You have a choice not to use one but I'm very rural so don't have gas and heating oil is extremely expensive so yes I have a wood burner. I have a free supply of wood to burn as have acres of wood which we coppice. I also have 5 diesel vehicles. Electric tractors aren't a thing neither are electric horseboxes. Not that I'd buy them if they were. Electric vehicles are like go carts and don't have the torque required to work the land in mud.

I think you are probably a city dweller with very little understanding of the countryside which provides your food.

You do you and I'll do me.

Not perfect but better.

The pellets are more controlled in terms of composition and the combustion is more complete than in random lumps of wood. That leads to fewer harmful chemicals being produced.

Hydrogen burning is probably the cleanest, followed by gas. Gas is clean because the fuel is uniform in composition and the combustion is tightly controlled to be complete in modern boilers, producing mainly water and CO2. You do get small amounts of other stuff like NOx and CO, but nowhere near as much as you would with wood, which also produces all sorts of other nasty stuff when you burn it. Most of the "smoke" you see coming out of gas boiler flues is actually water vapour.

I have a lead water pipe which the water company assures me is fine 😁

Is everybody just going to ignore the risks of a bakery scented commute, though?

Istr toasters were found to be very bad for particulates. And gas cookers/stoves, of course.

See I get turned off by hysterical hyperbole. There’s no way that a stove is as bad as passive smoking. I don’t even need any research to tell me that. You know passive smoking where the pollution is so bad you can see, taste and smell the pollution vs a stove where the pollution in the house is so minimal none of those things are true.

hope you don’t burn scented candles OP. They’re just as bad.

What about pellet stoves? In my village in Italy the more rural houses only have a stove as heating. Everyone seems to have replaced their old wood stoves with pellet stoves (I think due to EU regulations)

I recently had a woodburner put in. I have a large 5 bed house so having the central heating on was extortionate. We now heat the whole house for free (free wood is easy to get on fbmp) and use champagne corks as firelighters (they come from the yachts here)

I have it going all day and the heat moves up the house.

so yeah, free heating!

Then simply install an air quality monitor inside your home to see if the log burner is or is not producing particulates and VOC.

My experience is that they don't and that you are more at risk from VOC from cleaning products and Christmas trees and more at risk from 2.5 particulates from regular radiators.

This is why so many people in my village burn wood. No mains gas, and wood is cheaper.

https://www.dsawsp.org/health/children-and-wood-smoke#:~:text=A%20study%20linked%20pollution%20specifically,when%20air%20pollution%20levels%20rise.

I don't feel we should ban them as its individual choice but DD (asthma) struggles to breathe in a house with one, MIL didn't light hers when DD was there. A few of our neighbours have them and DD says she can feel them in her lungs bit when they are lit even from outside

So many posters dismissing the dangers. I remember the same kind of response from smokers when smoking became illegal inside public buildings. Lots of people won't take any notice until Local Authorities start to ban their use.

Wood is not toxic ffs

I was responding to the OP who quoted this study in isolation.

But pretty much all of the other studies focus on how wood burners increase pollutants in the outside environment.

And there is a massive difference between the effect in rural areas where wood burners are often the only source of heating or a much needed supplementary source to expensive LPG and Oil heating.

You also need to take into account that the particles in rural areas are higher in winter due to wood burners but lower over the rest of the year due to less traffic - so for a study to be truly robust it would need to take place over 12 months to show true daily averages of PM25.

The OP started this thread by asking if she was unreasonable to say that people with children shouldn't have wood burners based on a very limited study with many flaws.

She then went onto change the goal posts by listing studies which were largely about environmental wood burning pollution.

If she'd started the thread by asking AIBU to suggest wood burners should be banned in urban areas, it would be a whole different conversation

I’m 69, have lived for the last 46yr in a house with open fire. During that time I’ve been pregnant 3 times & the 3 children all grew up here. The fire (burning logs) was the principal & cheapest way we heated the house & water for many yrs.
None of us have suffered from “ miscarriage, low birth weight, respiratory problems or dementia.” as yet!!

I’ve only skimmed the “experiment” report, but cannot find exactly what the exact identity of the ‘offending’?? particulates actually are?
Possibly, the particulates were simply given off by synthetic carpets, cleaning sprays, or, the rucksack & its machinery used to measure them?
I’ve heard on bbc radio4 scientific reports that even at the south pole & in the guts of deep sea fish, plastic particulates are readily found.
(I have to admit that I’ve always avoided synthetic fabrics for clothing & furnishings.)
Scientists were obviously paid for this ‘experimental’ work?

This is one study to complement the already fairly hefty body of research on this. There absolutely no point picking it apart in isolation, you need to read it in the wider research context. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was followed up by larger studies to confirm the findings.

if you stood on a quiet street right in a plume of smoke on a cold evening.

Which is literally what happens when someone vents their smoke into the path of someone elses house as other people have described on here.

It sounds like you’re new to the world of research into this, quite understandably.

This is just ONE study that is adding to a body of research that has already been published. It sounds like the researchers particularly wanted to understand how and where children are exposed to air pollution, rather than a more general study, which we already have and which overwhelmingly show wood burning is a major problem.

Hmm are the wood burners any worse than the wood/ coal fires that every bloody house used to have. I think people needing to rip out their heat source is a bit OTT.

With the amount of bonfires people have in my area all year round burning worse than kiln dried logs a woodburner is quite tame.

And before anyone asks, no, the council don't see it as problem just inconsiderate and those that have said bonfires argue in good old MN style, it's their garden and can do as they like.
Although whenever I've pointed out that's fine but please do keep your smoke in your garden it's met with a look as though I'm the inconsiderate one.

Seems these people think that smoke stays within their boundaries.

It is a tiny study with a lot of caveats, missing data and slightly dodgy categorisation (confounding woodburners and open fires for example). It also doesn't take into account home conditions e.g. ventilation. Their lead in study that they quote in the introduction doesn't differentiate either but does make the link with poor ventilation (which this study does not):

A survey indicated that up to 75 % of households in rural Wales use firewood (Jennifer and James, 2013), raising concerns about indoor air quality, especially in poorly ventilated homes (Khalequzzaman et al., 2011). Socioeconomic and cultural factors such as fuel poverty and traditional hearth-centred gatherings can further elevate exposure risks (Ferguson et al., 2023; Roberts, 2020).

The pilot study involved 53 children from two primary schools, with 94 % providing valid data so only 50 children. It doesn't state how many of the children were from each school, so I am going to assume 25 at each - but if it was more at the urban school then the data will be even more skewed.

The number of children with fuel burning appliances are tiny 53% of students at school B = 13 children, 21% at school A = 5 children - 18 in total out of the 50 in the study.

It also looks like there was quite a lot of data excluded but it is not made clear how many hours of home environment data was actually lost:

However, some data loss occurred, mainly due to device battery depletion or power-offs during measurements, leading to incomplete profiles. Positional errors also happened when students did not carry their backpacks while moving between microenvironments.

While the study is keen to point out the impact of woodburners and uses EPC data for woodburners in their initial mapping, they don't actually differentiate between wood burners, open fires, Rayburns, ranges etc in the data from the study which a flaw because there is a big difference in the air pollution given off by a woodburner and an open fire.

Post-survey data as shown in Table 1 indicate that one key difference between the two schools lies in the prevalence of household fuel-burning appliances. Approximately 53 % of students at School B reported having a wood burner and/or fireplace at home, compared to 21 % at School A. This suggests that indoor biomass combustion is likely a significant contributor to higher PM2.5 exposure.

This is compounded by where the sensors were places at home as well:

Which room to place sensor within the home affects pollution measurement data. According to post-survey responses, backpack placement in the home environment varied: 20 % left in the bedroom as mentioned in the instruction, 26 % left them in the kitchen, 10 % in the living room, 36 % near doors or hallways, and 8 % in other locations.

In contrast, PM2.5 levels in bedrooms and living rooms were more moderate and consistent, showing narrower distributions and lower peaks. This suggests that these spaces may offer more stable air quality conditions, potentially due to less activity, better isolation from pollution sources, or more frequent changes in air flow to refresh polluted indoor air.

This does not distinguish between School A and School B but the violin graph shows that the highest pollution levels were when backpacks were placed in the hall (suggesting they were potentially effected by the outside environment) or the kitchen (where the cooker is and again, where potentially wood or coal burning rayburns are located).

Where backpacks were placed in the living room (where woodburners are more likely to be), pollution levels were not particularly high.

So yes - you are being Very Unreasonable to suggest that people should not use woodburners based an a very small study which does not take into account the different type of woodburning appliances, household condition and ventilation, had measurements based on where children chose to leave the sensors and has a significant amount of missing data, particularly from the home environment.

If you want a true view there would need to be a study of many more households with fixed sensors in the living rooms, a non-woodburner control group in the same environment (rural / urban).

And as for all the "we only burn seasoned wood" people, there's 10 more burning absolute shit that they've scavenged or all their plastic, as they can't be asked to recycle it. You only have to wander about of an evening and look up at the shitty black chimneys and then smell the stench of unsuitable stuff being incinerated or worse, gently simmered as that's even worse for the environment and people.

Do the people defending recreational burning here know to run their fires at higher temps?

If you have CH, really, this is just a hobby.

Particulate increase outside your home measured in London, is less than 10% of the annual mean PM2.5. It's at its worst on winter evenings. When outside, road traffic dominates your exposure - the only way it wouldn't is if you stood on a quiet street right in a plume of smoke on a cold evening.