Wood burner ban...

OP. If you, and others, really cared about the environment, the title of your thread would have been "Children ban . . "

If you really cared, you would be calling for a ban on women having babies. Because no matter how clean, green and "environmental friendly" you think you are, there's nothing you can do to mitigate the damage your children will cause to the environment.

Did they die young because of open fires? Or because of the many illnesses that we now vaccinate against, poverty, malnutrition, etc etc....?

An open fire is worse for both indoor and outdoor pollution. I’m not sure why it’s always stoves that people want to ban rather than the far more polluting open fires.

Love ours. I will march to Downing Street if they ban them.

That's because they're OK with anything, so long as they don't have to actually do anything themselves. This site is full of talkers.

Wood burners are disgusting. We have to close all the windows sometimes and the smoke makes my chest tight and I'm perfectly healthy. I feel really sorry for people with actual respiratory issues.

Grandparents swore by them. Parents too. When all the electric goes off that's the only form of heating/eating/boiling water.

Ffs we aren’t in a third world country with power cuts.

the older generations had no other options

We have 2 log burners - 1 each end of the house. All our wood is free from the farm collected after storm damage or when an oak throws a limb to support itself. The wood heats you 4 times cutting down into manageable pieces to bring back to the house, splitting, sorting and then finally burning. We would not survive without it as our only other heat is oil which has doubled in price in the last year. We make sure it is properly dry leaving it at least 2 years and burnt at the right temperature. It made a huge difference in efficiency from changing from open fires we inherited to the burners we now have. The house was built in the 1880s so it would be a very cold house otherwise.

I think this depends on where you have it and the layout of the house. We have one and im pretty sure it only heats the room it's in and the one directly above.maybe some puts out a bit of heat elsewhere - but not enough to not put the heating on a lot of the winter. So dont assume that.

Why do you think the gov is telling everyone to buy torches and stock up on fuel? Either someone has a good chance of turning the tap off on our imported gas supplies or crashing our infrastructure or it really was about pushing sales to get a decent number for the economy for last month.

I'd rather they completely banned smoking and vaping, tbh. Imo, that affects a lot more people that wood burners do, and more directly.

We spent a lot of money putting in a certified multifuel burner about 8 years ago that passed our area's smokeless zone rules, and we only ever use approved smokeless fuels, and wood certified as such (v. low moisture content).

Unless, they're going to reimburse us the money we spent, as it wasn't money we have to throw away, I don't think they should ban them.

I also think they should concentrate on reducing pollution from traffic and factories, etc, first as I'm sure that has more of an overall effect on air pollution that wood burners do.

Love mine, love the smell, the warmth, the cost of running it.

there usually some scaremongering every winter about banning them.

But the government is telling us to prepare for just such eventuality. You must be exceptionally lucky to live in an area that gets no powercuts.

I have exactly the same problem with opening my bathroom and kitchen windows to let steam out in the evening and it filling with the smell. I often think, am I the only one bothered by this? so good to have some validation. I live in a quite middle class area as well as people should know better.

And where exactly are your facts coming from? People have been using wood as source off fuel for decades! Look at Scandinavian countries!

I have one and it genuinely never triggers my asthma. I love it when it’s really cold outside and it really does generate so much heat in the house. If WW3/an emergency hit we’d be able to cook food and boil kettles on it.

Surely things like exhaust fumes/nitrates in bacon/microplastics are all worse. 🤷🏻‍♀️

What area are you in as that's pretty cheap... would you pm me the details of the company you use? Thanks

Can you share the studies that demonstrate these deaths please?

All I could find was a study commissioned by an environmental charity that used statistical modelling to claim that 2500 deaths were caused. It is not clear how they demonstrated that these deaths were caused by wood burners and apparently were not based on any individual cases.

You forgot breathing.

It’s a risk benefit thing surely for most people who have to make an informed decision.

If you live rurally, and depend on expensive oil, then wood burners are an affordable alternative. And if you are somewhere with regular power cuts. The risk of being cold needs to be weighed up against the risk of lung and fertility issues etc.

If you live in a city, and can afford gas central heating, then it may make less sense to risk your family’s health. And you could argue that city life comes with health risks of its own.

I am not a fan of banning things for everyone. But people need to make the right decision for them. I live in London so there isn’t a compelling reason to add the extra health risks from a wood burner to our lives at this point in time. We have an outdoor fire pit and will have to huddle round that if there’s a power cut, which would ofc add to pollution but then there would be a rationale to using it.

Think clearly. How could anyone ever have possibly conducted a study where they expose thousands of people to woodburner smoke and see if they become infertile/dementia/cancer. Surely that’s all they burnt as heating up until very recently. There’s lots of other stuff people have been doing to increase their chances of diseases and then there’s genetics.

Exactly. We had several power outages at work today.

Even if we started to address the problems with our aging electricity infrastructure as a matter of urgency we are unlikely to get to the end of this decade without some blackouts. And that's assuming Vlads fishing trawlers don't cut the interconnectors.

I just googled info about Nordic countries and wood burning heat sources. There are real concerns about the health implications there and premature deaths. I haven’t linked them here as I don’t know about the quality of the research. But looks like it is a worry for them too.

It sounds like you will be fine in a power cut!

I just don’t see the point of the argument you and others here use that ‘x/y/z are worse’? They may be but that doesn’t take away the individual risk from a wood burner?