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

[MojoMoon]

AIBU to say anyone using a wood burning stove with children in the house when it is for cosy vibes and other forms of heating are available should be viewed the same way as someone smoking with children in the room or the car?

Particulate pollution has been linked to miscarriage, low birth weight, respiratory problems and a higher risk of developing dementia.

Why do wood burning defenders respond so vigorously to studies like this? Is it because they have spent money on a wood burning stove and don't want to accept that they should remove it? Is it because they have a feeling of guilt about having been using it with children for years and worry about the damage already done? Or do they simply not believe particulates to be dangerous despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary.

Study:

Children living in homes with wood burners could be exposed to over three times more particulate pollution than those in non-wood-burning homes. The results come from a study that looked at air pollution experienced by primary schoolchildren in Wales.

Fifty-three children from two primary schools in Anglesey (Ynys Môn) were given backpacks equipped with air pollution sensors. They took the packs home and carried them during their journeys to and from school.
Dr Hanbin Zhang, from the University of Exeter and part of the study team, said: “One thing that stood out was the home environment. This was the largest contributor to children’s daily particle pollution exposure – more than school or commuting. This was mainly due to indoor sources such as wood burning and indoor smoking.”

Short peaks in particle pollution were linked to home cooking and secondhand tobacco smoke. Home heating with a fire or stove was linked to longer exposures. In some cases, these persisted overnight in children’s bedrooms as fires remained lit or smouldering with poor ventilation.
Prof Zhiwen Luo from Cardiff University, who led the study said: “During home hours, the average particle pollution in non-smoking homes with wood burners was about 13 micrograms per cubic metre compared with 3.5 micrograms per cubic metre in non-smoking homes without wood burners.
“The study is small, but the contrast was consistent and supports the conclusion that wood burning can substantially increase indoor particle pollution.”
One school was in Holyhead, and the other was in a rural area. We often think of towns and cities are being the most polluted places, but on average, researchers found urban children experienced less particle pollution, compared with those at the rural school.
The study took place in winter, and researchers attributed these differences to contrasts in wood burning. This took place in 21% of homes for the urban schoolchildren and 53% in the rural school.

Cooking added to the measured air pollution, especially when the backpacks were left close to the kitchen in the children’s homes. Short pollution peaks were also measured when children walked past bakeries and restaurants on the high street.

Particle pollution inside the schools was much lower than during travel and at home.

Children who walked to and from school experienced less pollution compared with children who were driven. Parental smoking while driving produced the highest concentrations measured in the study.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/06/children-living-homes-wood-burners-exposed-pollution?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479725042677?via%3Dihub

Also becausethe cost of energy is so extortionate in the UK lots of people are turning to use real fires to either supplement their heating and keep the central heating low or as a main source.

And the cost of energy is largely so high in the UK because of the environmetal lobby.

So the environmentalists are killing the kids by pushing people to wood burners??

How should we heat our homes that is affordable and healthy?

Beacuse living in a cold house is also very very bad for people...

If it's a wood burner or nothing, then obviously they are necessary, but surely most people can find a less harmful way of being 'cosy', or whatever their reason for having a wood burner is?

This.

The study appears to be comparing urban areas with rural areas and saying that rural areas have higher particulates in the home than urban due to wood burning stoves. It's likely that the rural areas may be using the stoves as their main heat source. Not using the stoves would have health risks too 🥶🥶🥶

"Having a wood burning stove" is not very harmful. For example, I "have a stove" in my garage, I'm pretty sure it isn't producing any particulates at all.

The biggest risk from using a woodburner occasionally isn't from particulates.... 🔥🔥🔥

Used to have to use smokeless fuel in my mums open fire which was in the city. Ordinary coal wasn't allowed.

Usually heating id imagine.

It's a bit of a stretch to blame it on woodburners though 😂 fair enough the poorly ventilated housing and smokers. UK is also cold and damp compared to much of Europe, and more densely populated than the rest. It's a good way to spread respiratory infections.

I'm particularly pissed off today as my back garden has smelt heavily of smoke all day. My throat is sore, my eyes are stinging and the air filter is going nuts.

If you are my neighbours, you can fuck off to beyond the furthest place you can fuck off to...I know you're normally nice polite people but really burning day and night is getting very tedious.

Lots of rural areas still heat using oil. It's expensive. Heat pumps may well be an improvement, but relying 100% on electric is still risky in areas where power cuts are likely. Woodburners will still be used as backup.

Does anyone have any stats from the scandi countries? They are generally electric with woodburners in rural areas. What are their particulate levels?

We just have a fire, no wood burner, in the countryside.

It might be fair enough if the study the op linked to actually found what she claimed it did. Given it doesn't, she simply looks like someone who is clueless but will jump on the latest bandwagon and pontificate without any proper research.

Hello - please could you link what you used to test your air quality?
I have a wood burner and would like to test our room air quality. Thanks.x

Particulate concentrations have greatly reduced over time. Woodburners are a target because they are one of the sources if particulates that are left, and it's easier to target woodburners than persuade people to reduce driving...

Road transport continues to be a major source of PM emissions, contributing 21 per cent of total PM2.5 emissions and 18 per cent of total PM10 emissions in 2023

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/emissions-of-air-pollutants/emissions-of-air-pollutants-in-the-uk-particulate-matter-pm10-and-pm25

Given these same particles are given off by burning toast or cooking bacon, I think we also need to close all greasy spoons, MacDonalds and take aways.

We get annoyed by things like this because many of us don't have an alternative way to heat our homes. We have no gas supply. I could use oil but I'm not convinced either burning that or the kids breathing in fumes from the tank in the garden would be better.

My kids have been brought up in front of one. No one in the house has ever had a chest infection, non of us are asthmatic. House is battered by the north sea so more exchange of air than I would like!

Why can't they study air quality in a set place and compare. I don't understand how wandering around with a back pack can give you results to compare.

I know right. I wish people would read past the headline.

that report is interesting “domestic” is level with road transport for some particulate sizes?

Those of us who live with somebody with a severe lung condition DO stop using many of those things as well. Witnessing an immediate severe struggle for breath tends to make the scientific evidence land very inescapably. It certainly makes it far less easy to deny.

I guess if you're lucky enough to have healthy lungs now, it's a lot easier to poo-poo the evidence on wood burners and other causes of harmful air pollution, as paying it proper attention means making inconvenient changes now, when the health issues probably won't make themselves known for a few decades.

A bit like how hard it is to get people to exercise, drink less, eat healthily and not smoke when they're young and feeling invincible, and the thought of cancer in 40 years time just doesn't touch the sides.

I have an interest in this because of DH's health, so I've been following the science for some time now. It's pretty incontrovertible. From what I hear from somebody I know who campaigns on this for one of the big health charities, it is the government who are dragging their feet on cracking down on wood burning, because of concerns for those in rural areas who have fewer other choices, rather than them wanting people to stop doing it.

I think changing public perception of this, and their behaviours, is a long-haul endeavour, and what's far more likely is that councils will increasingly crack down on it, until we have a situation where everywhere apart from the most rural areas will have a ban in place.

But they haven't targetted woodburners at all.

They have targetted cars through with ever stricter emission standards and clean air zones. If you ripped the cat off a car it would fail its mot and you would probably get prosecuted.

Whereas with woodburners people can still seemingly pump out as much crap as they want by burning unsuitable wood and don't have to pay a penalty for it.

Thousands of complaints and nothing being done about it.

Yes its interesting isn't it. I fell down a rabbit hole of airborne particulates 😂

"Domestic" isn't just woodburner stoves though, it's probably an everything else category - bonfires, fireworks etc... I wonder what else is included..?

Oh dear I might fall down another hole..🐇

You can find out who funded the research by downloading the PDF of the journal article (it's free) from the second link in the OP. Under "Funding" we find "This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/Y003772/1]".

Googling that grant number finds this page which describes what would probably be called an "umbrella grant" of £6,483,019 to Flora Samuel as "Principal Investigator" (as it's called). She is also the final name in the list of authors on the paper, which is standard in the social sciences as a way of signalling that she is the senior academic.

So it's all fairly worthy stuff, which most people (apart from perhaps full-on cartoonish climate change deniers of the "My Dad smoked 60 a day and it never did him any harm" variety) would find unobjectionable. The lead author is a postdoctoral researcher at Cardiff, so this was quite a serious level of work. But without preregistration of the project to say what they were looking for, it's hard to draw many conclusions about the extent to which wood burners cause harm. I suspect that the initial focus of the study may have been PM2.5 in general, and they may have decided to focus on the wood burner aspect when trying to find a core topic for the article that they wanted to submit to a journal.

Clearly it's "better" to be in a room without an active wood burner than with one, but we knew that already. A lot of science is about quantifying and reducing uncertainty rather than coming up with bright-line demarcations into "safe" and "unsafe". I'm not sure that we've even learned a lot in that sense either from this study, but I think it's interesting from the citizen-scientist point of view.

This is an interesting report. It says that daily variation in PM2.5 is mostly from heating and cooking, so I guess we should all stop that immediately.

uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat11/1212141150_AQEG_Fine_Particulate_Matter_in_the_UK.pdf

And yet we are still here and healthy. The vast majority of my family live well into old age and far past the life expectancy of their peers.

Yes, there's nothing wrong with the paper. It's a bit of a stretch to use it to bash woodburners as evil killers of our children though.

There are many sources of pollution. People without woodburners still light bonfires and fireworks, drive a car (and electric cars still produce particulates from tire wear), heat their homes, cook their dinner etc..

We had one in our old house (in London) and I loved it, though it produced so much heat that we could only use it on the coldest days. But knowing now what we do, I wouldn’t put one into my new house, lovely though they are.

Great. Can you tell me what these are?

For those of us without a gas supply. I keep hearing it said but what are they?