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

That people only have wood burners because it’s ‘middle class’.

@MojoMoon the whole world is on fire, and poisoned. I’m not being sarcastic. I think getting in a hump about wood burners is barking up the wrong small little twig, if you get my analogy. UK households are full of toxins, most of which do far far more daily harm - fabric softeners, dishwasher tablets, cleaning products, most of our children’s school uniforms have PFAS coatings, let alone the food we eat and expose ourselves to. Once you realise the horror is absolutely unavoidable it is depressing. But relatively and comparatively, there are far worse every day household causes of toxins than wood burners, many of which you will be guilty of and not be aware of.

do you know Anglesey? I know the area, it is very rural and quite deprived in some areas. Most of those houses are likely not to have gas central heating.

Fire has been the main source of human heating and cooking for several thousand years. If it was that bad we'd all have perished long ago.

I'm not saying it's good for us, but we all have to die of something and I'd rather live a life that's warm and dry.

For us, a fire isn't "just because it's cosy" - it's one of our principal sources of heat and is very affordable for us. We also have oil, but that's shockingly expensive.

It's actually bad for your health in surprisingly small amounts.

I adore my wood burner. Your post has just made me excited to go home and light it later this afternoon after a drizzly grey day!

You can't stop or start doing something every time a study is published. You need scientific consensus.

The UK introduced smokeless zones (now smoke control areas) in cities for a reason. I live in a city and we have pretty good air quality (especially now with electric buses). If you really live in the middle of nowhere then a woodburning stove is forgivable but my DSis lives in a rural town and she says the air quality is shite between diesel vehicles and so many of her neighbours having woodburning stoves, in her area they're not even legally obliged to use the low-smoke types.

uk-air.defra.gov.uk/data/sca/

It is sad that so many families can’t afford to heat their house without harming their children ( and themselves )

I suspect there are as many as won’t be caring enough to reduce spending on other things

A wood burning stove is a thing of beauty and people love that they can use free wood. I have hankered after one for ever, but am aware of the research and regretfully, wouldn't buy one.

However well designed they are, if you can smell burning wood in the room, that's particulates.

I know someone whose whole house and hot water system is based on a woodburning stove. They have been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer despite never smoking, That's anecdotal, obviously, but the scientific research is not.

People defend them passionately because they are beautiful and seem very natural. But there are definitely real risks to their use.

Well we’d have no hot water with out our wood fuelled Rayburn , we run it 24/7 in the kitchen almost all year round and have a large wood burner in the living room also on 24/7 in winter. I grew up like this ( in the same house) so did hubby our 3 children and ourselves seem quite fine! Bit of a drama post, out in the country it’s some people’s only heating!

We were sent this by our council -
https://www.cleanairhub.org.uk/clean-air-night

This is exactly the set up of my friend with stage 4 lung cancer. Much higher risk than occasionally sticking the fire on for an afternoon. And not picked up until routine screening in their early seventies, so feeling fine is not really any guarantee that there is no issue.

There is absolute scientific consensus that wood burning is bad for your health, and has been for years.

I would welcome a good study into the issue, this one seems to have quite a few flaws/gaps. I also question why wood burning is the only thing mentioned when lots of other things in the study were said to raise pollution.

• The sample size is tiny and from only one location.
• There is no mention of whether the fires are open, older log burner, or modern standards ones.
• Cooking with gas vs electricity is not mentioned.
• Equivalent particle emissions per unit of energy produced by power stations are not mentioned.
• It recommended cutting wood burning, but not cigarette burning, or gas fires, so implies a bias or agenda.
• It doesn't look into why people burn wood, or how to replace it. If they have no access to mains gas for a boiler, they may have no choice.

We have a log burner and have a fire every week or two. We also have solar panels and cook with electricity, not gas. I can't honestly believe that is a major issue.

It's very much a status thing where I am... like the wood storage at the front of the house so people walking by can see you have real fires / log burners.

People get them installed when they 'do the extension'... and then post photos of their dog sitting beside the cosy fire!

It's a luxury not a necessity in London - no one needs to be burning stuff indoors to keep warm.

Perhaps I would feel differently if it was the country but in London it's highly polluting.

Exactly this. Posters commenting on wood burners being “middle class” is daft. Those living on Anglesey aren’t using wood burners to look good on insta. They may have no choice; it may be their only source of heating. That research article also mentions “open fires” more than once so it’s unclear whether they’ve lumped wood burners and open fires together (I haven’t read the article in great detail). Of course there’s more particulates being put into the room from open fires than stoves.

You are NBU at all OP.

There is a wealth of evidence - growing rapidly now - that wood burners are really bad news for health and the environment.

A different study this week put air pollution as number 7 on the list of modifiable risk factors for cancer. People subjected to greater levels of air pollution get more cancers. It also massively increases the risk of Alzheimer's, lung disease, heart disease, miscarriage, low birth weight and other awful health outcomes.Wood burners contribute in a large way to that.

Yet people are very resistant to accepting the scientific evidence. We've seen it on this thread, with people declaring that it must be worse to be breathing in traffic fumes in urban areas. Yes, it feels like that must be the case, but the scientific evidence shows otherwise. Yet people refuse to accept it.

I guess they don't want to.

Wood burning does feel very cosy. it's nice to sit in front of one, it feels like a treat. A comfort. In some areas, where you can pick up wood for free, it will be cheaper than running a boiler. Things like these make it hard to think about giving up.

If you have one, when you read studies like this, it's not going to make comfortable reading. There's the fact you might have spent a lot of money on it, only to find you're now feeling uncomfortable about using it. That doesn't feel good, so unless you're skilled in sitting with difficult emotions, you deny, dismiss and push it away.

Same if you're feeling guilty about what harms you might have already subjected your kids to - that feels really bad, so instead of allowing yourself to feel those difficult feelings, you deny, push them away, assume the evidence is wrong and defend and counter-attack.

It's going to take a while before the efforts to educate the public on this really land, unfortunately. Which is a pity, because people are being harmed in the meantime.

I have a wood stove, and an air quality monitor. The air quality barely changes when the stove is lit, only when it's first lit it goes up by 1. Making toast or any kind of fried food on the hob sets the alert for high PM off multiple times a day, however. New furniture sends the VOC levels sky high for a few days while it off gasses. The stove isn't an issue.

We’re all going to die of something if I live to 70 in my cosy farmhouse I think I’ll be okay.

It also doesn’t examine what type of wood people are using. There’s a huge difference between wet wood (often foraged at no cost), and kiln dried (below 20% moisture). Using kiln dried logs reduces particulates by up to 85%.

Equating an open fire fuelled by wet wood, with a modern stove using kiln dried logs, is not a good basis for a controlled scientific study.

Trust me, it really doesn't feel OK to get cancer in your early seventies, that's a very early death these days.

Did you read the full article. I just did and it is very interesting. The study was done on 53 kids split across a school in Holyhead Anglesey and one in a rural village in Anglesey. There was higher particulates found by monitors in the rural school than in the urban. This COULD be due to the fact that more households in the rural area have woodburners. It also talked about other sources of rural pollution and the fuel poverty in particularly the rural area.

Posh people woodstoves are modern, well ventilated and burn lovely seasoned hardwood. I live in a rural Welsh village with lots of poverty and folks here burn what they can get their hands on to keep warm. Lots of the houses are fitted with backboilers (the fire is what heats their water) and despite grants it is still very common for wood / coal to be the main source of heating. The black smoke coming out of some of the chimneys round here is terrible.

How do you propose to fix that? If they don't light the fire they have no heat and hot water. They have no money to retro-fit central heating (our village is old and old cottages have no cavity wall insualtion or gas central heating!). We get no gas so it's expensive storage heaters or an oil fired boiler. Wood burners may be an optional extra in London suburbs but in rural North Wales they are the main / only source of heat for many and it is better to enjoy a bit of particle pollution than to freeze to death!

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Oh, I needed a laugh!

A wood stove that is used for a few months of the year isn't any danger whay so ever to anyone. You didn't grow up in the 80s did you OP . . .

Christ, kids back then even had unsupervised play times. The average Saturday was spent hanging out at the local quarry, climbing rocks, swimming in flooded mines, hanging out on street corners and back home when the street light by the chippy went on. And strangely enough, most grew up with open fires. Even more bizarre, they're mostly all still alive now.

You can get help for your anxiety. 🙄

I live in a fancy area of London, and I can smell in the evening the (lovely) woodsmoke wafting down to the less fancy high rises. I think anything that adds to pollution and isn't essenital is undoubtedly selfish, just like idling a car.

Because the scientists get paid to produce the results. If we paid researchers to debunk climate change, guess what the studies would say . . .