People that call wood burners dirty / polluting / not green are ignorant

[Sazzas]

With a modern stove that is DEFRA approved it reburns the smoke so hardly any smoke comes out of the chimney. Also as apose to gas or oil powered heating its far greener, less environment impact and local. My wood all comes from down the road from a responsibility managed forest and by buying it I'm promoting more of the land to be converted into forestry.

Its by far the cleanest, greenest and most sustainable way to heat my home

Do they really say that about wood burners? Is this your primary heat source or an additional one?

Yanbu. However for it to be truly "green" you need to be using it sufficiently hot, have a properly insulated chimney and, as you say, use local wood.
Unfortunately though there is not nearly enough wood in the uk available to heat all houses so it's only sustainable as long as a relatively small number of us use one.

Primary.

Yep its hot(thermometer above it) and insulated. Well with only 26% of agricultural land used in the country, there is a whopping amount of free land that could be used to plant more forests. I don't have the knowledge to know if that is enough for the countries needs. With a modern insulated house it doesn't take much of a fire to keep it toasty.

Lucky you. How much does that set you back, then?

There are areas of Britain where people have little option but to use wood burners to heat their homes. Through lack of funds, or lack of knowledge, don't have their old woodburners up to safety standards. Some die of carbon monoxide poisoning. (Even in forested areas where residents can collect firewood for free).

You're not undeasonable for choosing that option yourself, but to impose it on masses of others is short sighted, imo.

Didn't think op was imposing her view on others. Simply asking if some others are ignorant, which they are.

But ours took thousands (£2-3k?) to install and set up properly. Fully acknowledge that few would be able to do that.

Our one hardly gives us any heat (but that's for a different thread maybe)

YABU. Not all woodburners are green. And as Christelle says, it's only sustainable if a small number of people use them (until we start using all the free land to grow trees on, which won't happen because we need it to build more houses on).

I'm also thinking about the ludicrous project to convert coal-burning power stations in the UK to burning wood chips. On paper it looks greener but this is just carbon credit chicanery - the wood chips have to be shipped thousands of miles from Louisiana to the UK as not enough trees are grown here, which negates the green 'carbon neutral' status companies like Drax claim.

There is no easy solution. Nuclear is the only option, IMO, and that's controversial and extremely expensive.

To plant a proper forest don't you need to include trees like oak? And then leave it for a few hundred years. So it would be OK to use woodburners in about 2315?

I don't know much about it, obviously, but they've just cut down a load of forest near me, and planted it up with the vile leylandii. My 'witchy' commute to work will never happen again, and all the varied ground cover is gone forever.

Nuclear is not the only option!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! X trillions.

As I've said only a small percentage of agricultural land is used, lots of free space too plant forests.

Not enough room to plant forests as it all needs to be built on

It cost me 900 for a premium Nordic cast iron modern stove and the same again to install it. After 4 years I broke even compared to using the oil burner (maybe longer now the price has dropped) and I have enough wood already bought to last me till 2017.

What are the other options then, Sazzas? Coal is polluting and no one wants shale in their back gardens. Same problem with solar - nimbys don't want it in their line of sight, and in any case we couldn't rely on it for baseload power as you can't yet store the power produced. Offshore wind is great, but again hugely expensive and does not produce baseload power. Hydroelectric, tidal and waste-to-energy technology is developing and some projects are getting off the ground but again, nowhere near enough power produced to fuel the country.

I get your point re and - in an ideal world we'd all plant fuel trees on spare agricultural land. But there is nowhere near enough land in our densely populated country to plant enough trees to produce a sustainable source of energy. Plus I can't imagine the difficulties any government would have coordinating such a project among the thousands of private individuals who own such land.

Perhaps someone could invent a sushi burning stove?

Coal is far better than nuclear. Modern coal powered fire stations reburn the smoke and are not as polluting as they used to be. Nuclear just saves up problems for future generations to deal with. Very selfish.

People could just use less electricity. I use very little, led light bulbs, pressure cooker, induction cooker, a++ appliances, keep showers to two mins, only use the oven when I'll make use of all shelves etc.

Totally agree that we should all use less. But coal burning fire stations reburning the smoke? Nope. You might be referring to CHP technology which is a bit like insulation and makes the station more efficient, but they are still as polluting as hell. And more so in non-European countries.

We have no gas, like many other houses in our village we use solid fuel.

My house is the cheapest house I have ever had to heat. The system is very, very efficient. Very.

Of course in many ways it is a pain in the arse. With the hours dh and I work we don't really have the time to properly tend the fire so it ends up on low burns for far longer than it really should, the stove isn't maintained as it should be. We don't have the storage space for wood and you can't keep the fire on a low burn for long enough with wood so we mostly use coal. Which of course is a whole other issue. BUT I think that even with coal it is more energy efficient than gas or oil because of the way it works, it keeps the house as an ambient temperature and it heats the water simultaneously.

However, I don't think wood burners are the solution. We should be looking to build all new houses with things like ground source, that would be fab.

At present I have a stack of wood that came from the hedge in the field (trees are coppiced so cut & come again) but I have also been told that if I compressed and dried horse dung I could burn that - have any of you tried that? That would really be eco-friendly as there's more horse muck round here than we know what to do with.

YANBU to think people being rude about your woodburner are a bit ignorant. Not sure they're practical for the whole country though. They're pretty expensive to install as well.

Most woodburners aren't green. Yours might be better than most, but that doesn't change the base situation.

The greenest thing to do out of a lot of not-very-green alternatives is to insulate your home like mad.

Well, at least she's trying...

even with the most super-duper stove - the logs need to be cut, sawn up into right size, split and stored for approx a year. Not all wood is suitable - Oak and Ash are the best, most efficient burners but take years to grow.
then there is the problem of continuity - when do you light the stove, bank it up, turn it down - electricity, gas and oil are there at the press of a button
the logs need to be purchased and stacked and brought into the house when needed (never store wood in the house because of wood-boring insects)
I could go on - I don't think the deniers are ignorant (your term) but just not aware of how efficient these stoves can be (speaking as a rural dweller with one) - are they practical for everyone - of course not.

they need to invent a nappy burning stove.. two birds, one stone.

I live in a flat and we do not need to use heating much. I should finish insulating the loft and then we would need it less. having only one outside wall that is well insulated and a flat below to send up heat helps.

wood burning stoves and gas fires are not possible in a flat.

I feel that solar power is the future, although storage of power is an issue. I don't think that either coal or nuclear power is a long term solution. Nuclear power has the issue of a finite amount of uranium and the issue of what you do with the radioactive waste. It's not like shale which is just unsightly and a potential source of an avalanche.

I hope that there will be new power sources in the future. The earth is bathed in huge amounts of sunlight. The challenge is to capture that energy and get it where and when it's needed so we do not need fossil fuels or nuclear power.

Needs to be a combination of solutions I think and sadly nuclear isn't one of them, there is the ultimate safety issue and what you do with the waste.

It isn't much good saying that the problem with solar and wind is that they are expensive and NIMBYs don't want them. Nuclear power stations cost huge amounts and many people would fight a power station far, far harder than they would a wind or solar farm.

We do need to do something about the power situation in the UK pronto, we are reaching a huge crunch and it is only by juggling with balancing services and the idea of switching off power to industries that we are going to get through this winter ok if we get a harsh winter. Governments have not acted quickly enough over the last couple of decades to prevent what could become a real problem.

I love my wood burning stove - my wood for the past two years has come from conservation projects and storm falls.