If you use a wood burning stove - what would change your mind?

[letmeeatinpeace]

I live in a densely populated area in London, and the smoke from wood burners seems to be getting worse each year (it's coming into our home).

I'm intrigued to hear from people who use wood burners whether there's anything that would possibly change your mind to stop using them?

I would really love to persuade our smoke-producing neighbours to be more considerate and switch them off, or at least switch to something smokeless, so any tips on how to go about it in a positive way would be much appreciated.

I don't actually know which property it's coming from - it's probably several.

Would dropping leaflets with useful info about smokeless fuel, and proper stove usage be appreciated..? I'm pretty desperate..! (I'm borderline asthmatic, and really worry about my dc's exposure)

Also, is smokeless fuel genuinely smokeless?

(I will also go down the route of contacting my council, if needed, but I just don't imagine they'd do much specially as we don't know where it's coming from)

Why was your chimney flu open? In most countries it’s normal to have a means of closing the flu when not in use to stop heat being lost. For some reason uk chimneys don’t seem have this . Ours did when we stayed in the USA.

With regard to air quality- all those plug ins, air fresheners, wax melts, diffusers are terrible for that.

We tried sealing the bottom, the landlord eventually sealed the top on our side, it still stank and seemed to be seeping through the flue, but at least the alarm didn’t go off anymore. As is often the case the people creating the problem owned their home but didn’t want to spend any money fixing it and we had no choice except beg our landlord to spend money on a problem someone else was creating.

And yes many plug ins etc also create air pollution, not sure the relevance.. I don’t use any and if my neighbours do they don’t pump them out of their roofs in industrial quantities. Whereas they do pollute our inside air with measurable, smellable smoke that affects my health.

Thanks to the log burner our heating bill last night in -6 was zero as we were using our own ash die back logs. House was toasty and the cat was in heaven.

Saving a bit of the mere 12 days of gas reserves the UK has for the ones who want to ban our stoves so they can be warm too this winter was an added bonus.

Rural homes that suffer real fuel poverty or are genuinely impossible to heat without them should get permission to use them, obviously. We cannot have people freezing!

This issue isn't isolated to rural homes. I live in a city. Out hearing was on 6 to 11 today and its 14⁰ inside at the moment. Have given up and put the fire on.

Same here, we've come home from the shops and thanks to my reynards, my feet are completely numb but also painful, I could barely walk around, hands and fingers the same but not quite as much impact. The heating was on all day yesterday and this morning but just cant have the impact that the fire has.

So its gone straight on and Im thawing out.

I don’t think you’re meant to burn ash dieback wood

You can burn it. It may have been more useful if the non damaged bits could be sold for furniture making etc, but if the poster needs to use it for firewood its perfectly safe.

@TheNoonBell Our logs for this year are a dead ash tree too. Every cloud.....🙂

I can’t. I’m deep in my overdraft paying for it but it seems better than the alternative at this point 😩

The Nordic countries are mostly using heat pumps only now and stay warm, because they are really well insulated and use triple glazing. The UK needs to properly insulate and retrofit its housing stock (and consider demolishing the minority of very old homes which are impossible to retrofit and insulate properly). Other countries are managing this.

@user1477391263 A lot of people are working on it.

I've spent the last 10 years upgrading windows, doors and insulation. I've had a new roof & liner, installed a new super-efficient boiler. Put skylights in the kitchen to create a 'solarium' that heats itself in spring & autumn. I've cut our heating bill by 60%

And I've created a savings pot for a GSHP that will be installed when this boiler dies (2029?) but it takes time to save enough money. The GSHP plus installation will cost £20k at today's prices.

People seem to forget that ashp and gshp run on electricity and most of our electricity in this country comes from burning fossil fuels

@user1477391263

"The UK needs to properly insulate and retrofit its housing stock (and consider demolishing the minority of very old homes which are impossible to retrofit and insulate properly)."

++++

I agree that properly insulating housing stock offers the best value solution- there is no point generating further renewable energy if it is simply wasted due to poor insulation.

As for the very old housing stock that cannot be insulated properly most of these are the small minority of listed buildings where for example double glazing is not allowed. I don't think it would be too popular as a policy demolishing listed buildings.

The proportion of electricity generated from fossil fuels is in fact less than 50% and shrinking all the time, so if you fit one now the fossil fuel proportion should be lower each year.

Yes, they do have brilliantly well insulated homes. But when I visited Finland recently on a work trip, my colleagues in their newly built ruralish house had installed both electric and wood fired cookers and sauna (every house has a sauna but the city saunas are electric from what I was told). They told me it was normal to do that - there is just so much forest cover there and wood was free.

And they also - like a lot of families - had a sauna hut in the forest next to a lake that was also wood fired and water heated for showers - no electricity at all. Boy that lake was cold 😂🥶

It would be good if that was the case but less than half of our energy comes from renewables (and that figure actually includes biomass - including wood). In particular during colder months which is actually when we need the heat sources, most is coming from gas. We have increasing levels of solar but our infrastructure can’t take back and store most of the excess generated. We need more wind and wave investment since it’s what we have as an island.

Locally they’ve built a new power station which supplies most of the electricity to the city. It burns household rubbish. Not sure if that counts as renewable or not but surely that can’t be good for pollution? They burn nearly 200,000 tonnes of rubbish a year.

hi all, I don't have a wood burner, but wondering if one only heats up one room, or the whole house. Just wondering how this works out for people?

Also, I've read that they're really bad for lung health - just wondering if people know this and if so, are you not concerned about this?

Genuinely interested. thanks.

@ilovecandyy , a lot of posters above say that they heat the whole house and love them. Others, like me, have concerns about fine particulate pollution in particular. My neighbours lit theirs last night. I sealed up every opening but still ended up with a sore throat, itchy eyes and the smell of woodsmoke in my house. I don't think they are burning anything illegal or doing anything wrong, it's just unavoidable. Given that a ban is unlikely before the next cold snap I have bitten the bullet and ordered an air purifier. Fingers crossed it improves things.

Thanks for responding. I've been looking into them lately, but the medical research behind it is quite scary. Also for children breathing it all in :(
I've used an air purifier before when I lived near a main road and I recommend them!

A lot of people on here seem to think their stoves don't create much pollution inside their home - they even have pollution monitors to check. My concern is the smoke coming out of their chimneys and exposing neighbours to pollution. But they don't seem to be too worried about this. A lot of them seem to live in the middle of nowhere, but I live in London and people use woodburners here too, which is annoying.

I'm old enough to remember the days when no one thought about passive smoking, and if the issue was raised smokers would either laugh at you or insist it was their right to do as they pleased. Family parties at our house consisted of more than a dozen people in a small front room and all of them smoking except me and my parents. I still worry about what damage that did to us. (At least they let me drink alcohol!) Cultural shifts happen painfully slowly, then suddenly.

We have an open fire. Don't use it very often, but have unlimited access to seasoned wood so can when we choose to. Is there any difference pollution wise between an open fire and a wood burner? I've never known anyone with a wood burner. My family have always had open fires.

Wow, this thread is still going.
In answer to the op. There’s probably nothing that would change my mind.
I purchased my wood burner about 5 years ago, simply because I’ve always fancied one. It’s used in the winter, but only when it’s really (minus temps) cold.
We have spent a lot of money updating our windows, doors and boiler. We have added a lot of insulation to the loft. For the majority of the time, we keep our house warm with gch, but when it’s really cold, we light the burner and it swiftly warms up the downstairs.
I see it as an alternative heat and cooking source. The world is very unstable atm and we have seen that wars in other countries affect what happens here. Until we have a 100% home produced power, I won’t be getting rid of my log burner.

We had a funny thing happen yesterday.

We got our tree yesterday, nothing unusual, usual sort of tree that we would always have, but the monitor went mad, it was red for a long time, the tree had clearly brought something into the house that it didnt like pollution wise