Wood burner ban...

@PleaseDontStepOnTheDaisies Seriously, you need to get your sense of smell checked out. Drive through any village on a winter evening, with your car window open, and it reeks of smoke. Because the particles fall down to the ground (you know, due to gravity).

But open fires produce vastly higher amounts of small particulate matter. So why not ban them, it'd have a far greater effect on hazardous pollution. The only difference is that wood burners are considered a fashionable, posh accessory, and labour can't bear anything that's associated with private wealth.

So half filling my oil tank cost £900 last week.
That will last 8weeks with really stingy usage.

Should we freeze or use our free, seasoned logs on our log burner🤔. Let me think.....

Not sure a study based on 20 households counts for anything at all.

This!

Talk of them being banned is wildly exaggerated, and it won't happen because of the risk of people being left without a heat source. Don't forget that many, many people in the country use oil for their heating, which has more than doubled in price during the last 12 months. We used to live in rural Wales where we had oil heating, and there's no way we could have continued to afford it at the price it is now. However, we did have a ready supply of trees and logs, and so the wood-burner would have become our only method of heating. It's all very well for those of us who live in towns and cities to say how bad they are for your health, but I'd sooner die from the effects of burning wood, than I would of hypothermia.

Countries likes Norway, Sweden and Denmark have more log burners per household than UK but also have better lung and general health rate than UK so how do the naysayers explain that???

I love my log burner

Scotland needs to start building certified Passivhaus homes. They stay warm for up to a week in a power cut.

I love that smell!

Not entirely clear on what medical coding you're referring too, but things like pollution are rarely directly attributed to an individual's outcomes, they're worked out on a population level.

Hertfordshire County Council commissioned a report that came up with 2200 deaths a year for woodburning stoves (copy of report here), road traffic deaths you can easily look up, but I went from memory that they are under 2000.

Yep. We filled ours last week and it’s double the price of last year. I’ve not saved enough into the heating budget for it this year so it’s into main savings to heat our home. People not on oil or who have never experienced it don’t understand that level of stress. We both work from home so I’ll take it as a cost of doing business. But if prices don’t drop next year it could be cheaper to rent office space 🙈

New research published today saying all wood burners are harmful to children's health in homes that have them.

They are known to be as harmful as smoking indoors.

If you already smoke cigarettes in your house with your kids around crack on. If you would be horrified at the idea of doing this consider finding an alternative to your log burner for the sake of your children.

Wait until they hear about people burning charcoal on their barbecues.

Do you have a link?

Yes, it is not comparing like with like.

The deaths from RTA are confirmed from clinical coding.

The presumed deaths where air pollution was a factor are modelled and based on extrapolation and include wider deaths from co morbidities. It is all.completely hypothetical.

In terms of how many deaths could be wholly attributed to a wood burner, I imagine the answer would be in the single figures at most. There may have been one that exploded and killed someone outright in the blast or something.

I actually think it is really dangerous to state things like this.

Smoking is directly responsible for the early and avoidable deaths of millions of people and directly causes years of avoidably poor health prior to killing people.

Saying to smokers that anyone who who heats their home with a woodburner is doing as much damage to their health as a smoker, is very likely to reduce motivation to stop or cut down smoking. It is very likely to reduce efforts by smokers to stop smoking indoors around their children and during pregnancy etc.

Where is the evidence to say there is no point giving up smoking if you have a wood burner for eg?

Where is the evidence that considers the 24/7 365 day nature of smoking over the seasonal use of solid fuel? And weights the outcomes?

Or are you saying that the risk of neoplasms and respiratory and cardiovascular disease is the same in a household that heats using a wood burner as it is for a family living with a 20 a day smokers year round? The messaging here is impactful and bloody important. And will likely condemn more children to more cigarette smoke.

So please share that research.

This is true for most of the research linked here as "proof" that wood burners are mass murderers.

When you start digging into the numbers and the methodologies the wood burners are rarely broken down by type, the particles are not clearly distinguished and other forms of pollution are poorly controlled for.

And of course the reality for families depending on woodburners is that even if they have an older style wood burner which is less efficient at filtering the choice they face is wood burner vs freezing. More so than ever this last year.

Lots of the evidence mixes open fires - bonfires etc and coal burners with wood stoves.

I dont think it would be that difficult to study solely hones with woodburners so am a bit baffled why that hasn't been done.

From what? Childhood diseases, Black Death, coal tar on the lungs?

No it really isn't like saying that.

There is clear and substantive evidence going back decades showing a causal relationship between regular cigarette smoking (specifically cigarettes) and increased occurrence of lung cancer.

There is nothing remotely like this to support the headline grabbing "woodburners are killing our baybeees" nonsense regularly trotted out on these threads. Go through the research and you will find tiny numbers, poorly controlled external factors, poorly distinguished sources and types of woodburners, poor control for household ventilation and maintenance practices. Oh and its always worth checking the funding for any research whatever it is used to promote.

Of course you then also need to consider any residual risk against the risk of living in cold, damp housing which for many is the alternative. Contrary to what MN thinks most wood burners are not in Islington.

Its the classic SM trope "I've read a clickbait headline about something I don't want myself so let's ban it". See also "SUV" threads which want to ban all "SUV"s without ever defining "SUV" or explain how that huge category of very small to very large vehicle has a common problem, different from other vehicles.

Not this again.