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)

My house would be uninhabitable without one. We have three, and they’re our source of heating in an old and cold house (aside from an aga in the kitchen).

we put them in in place of open coal fires.

It might not be that bad inside the home with the woodburner, as the stove is well sealed, however that smoke goes out the chimney and blows over neighbouring properties (and gets inside, if the properties are draughty like mine).

I don't need an air pollution monitor as I can smell the smoke inside and outside of my home. Maybe some people are more sensitive to the smell than others, but surely if we can smell it it's causing pollution.

Sure, a lot things we do inside the house cause indoor air pollution, but I have some degree of control over that whereas I have no control of the smoke I breath outside my house, and limited control over smoke coming into my house - it's not easy to seal every little draught in an old home.

As I said I got myself an air monitor due to the constant hysteria on threads like this that I was poisioning myself and my family. Result is that theres no issue with the air inside my home bar for the odd event of frying, cleaning, scented candles etc

Don't all the fumes from a log burner go up the chimney and outside where everyone else gets to breathe them in? Putting an air quality monitor inside is pretty pointless.

Well apparently, (over numerous threads), I was poisioning myself and my family by having one because it would cause terrible pollution in the house.

I wanted to test this out and check for myself.

Not really. Most of the arguments re modifying your own behaviour to prevent environmental issues are based pretty much on selfishness - doing what you want at the expense of the planet and everyone else.

After all, if you can prove you are OK, who gives a damn about what happens to the rest of the world ?

As well as selfishness, a lot of the arguments are also based on economics. It's understandable that in a COL crisis with gas and electricity prices so high, people will look at alternatives. Perhaps, rather than ban woodburners, the way forward may be through the way energy is priced, including taxation of some kind. An annual license that offset the savings from free or cheap wood might persuade people to use them less, or not install them in the first place, and for those not on the gas grid, heat pumps might become more appealing.

If governments want individuals to make changes they either have to force them, make it so easy it's a no brainer or make that choice vastly cheaper. Waiting for people to do things out of the goodness of their hearts when it costs them a lot of money and/or inconvenience isn't going to work.

Humans will always have an impact on their environment, being self interested is not selfish throwing that word around to hope to shame people wont work.

Im not worrying about this, we live an incredibly small life and using our burner is one part of that. We have the cleanest air in this country that we have had for decades so things improve year on year, I simply dont buy that people have all this smoke coming in their house, when my own house doesnt have it coming in either and I dont get it from other houses in the street either.

Much goes up the chimney but the closest house to the chimney is the house with the woodburner so it comes back in through the windows, doors and vents anyway.

Then most burners do emit particulates into the room directly.

There is no reality in which you can burn stuff in the house and have air as clean as it would be if you didn't burn stuff in the house.

Electrostatic filters are another option.

Much in the same way we have upgraded cars and boilers to make them more efficient in terms of the pollutants they emit, we could insist that anyone burning solid fuel has to filter the smoke to remove the particulates. It won't get rid of them all, but will reduce considerably.

In my previous house our neighbours wood burner set off our smoke alarm because it got sucked down our chimney. They were hippies with a rainbow fence and everything tiedyed and they did not give a shit that my ashthma went from barely existent to multiple inhalers a day because they liked the back-to-nature vibes of burning wood in a densely populated suburban area.

Where I am now there are several neighbours with wood burners, one clearly does not use dry clean wood as the you can see the grey heavy smoke coming out lower than everyone’s first floor windows and spreading over all of our houses. But even when it’s ‘only’ the multiple other neighbours who are probably using the stoves correctly, it does take our air monitor into ‘polluted’ - the levels are almost always above the WHO guidelines as soon as the cold weather starts, and so we can’t ventilate our house, have worsened asthma, and have to spend more money on air purifiers and dehumidifiers as well as our own (green supplier) heating. And it’s not old rural houses in fuel poverty, it’s bougie newly added woodburners in an area too crowded for them.

The idea that joe bloggs with their Amazon purchased monitor is able to say their wood burner is perfectly safe when scientific studies with appropriately calibrated ,expensive ,scientific instruments have already shown they are not, is also somewhat laughable. Own it people, nobody is saying those living out in rural England with no alternative have to stop using them but as the governments own research shows, in cities it’s generally wealthier people using them for primarily aesthetic reasons, perhaps those people could change their behaviour to avoid contributing to other people health problems?

Totally agree about the monitors!

Own it people, nobody is saying those living out in rural England with no alternative have to stop using them but as the governments own research shows, in cities it’s generally wealthier people using them for primarily aesthetic reasons, perhaps those people could change their behaviour to avoid contributing to other people health problems?

This was exactly what I was trying to emphasize in my anecdote about my clueless friend. I know several people who have them in London and they are all very wealthy - they like the look and feel of them and don't care about the impact on other people (but also berate generally less wealthy people with diesel cars who were against the introduction of ULEZ due to the impact of emissions on their children's primary school etc).

If you live in the middle of nowhere it's basically irrelevant. I really think they should be banned in urban areas.

I do agree with you all that in a city on mains gas burning wood that is causing air pollution shouldn't be happening. And I am surprised that the amount of smoke being claimed doesn't breach regulations - smoke free zones/Clean Air Act etc. All the stoves we have had have a secondary burner to stop smoke and you can rarely tell they are lit from outside. In our last but one house though one was a natural gas 'wood burning stove' look a like and it was pretty good compromise. But no gas now.

What is clear from this thread is how different people's lives and needs are - and how difficult it is to put yourself in someone's shoes. I wouldn't live or raise children in a big city for a lot of the reasons mentioned on here - traffic pollution being a major one - even the tube has horrendous air quality from what I have read recently. London just seems grimy, smelly and unhealthy to me. Not at all bothered about farming/animal smells and bonfires though - each to their own!

I checked the air quality website - really interesting thank you for posting that. We are in the lowest category - 8th percentile - so that is reassuring.

I demolished a large 1970's building recently and the amount the recycled was astonishing. Apart from the asbestos, almost everything else was separated for reuse. They even picked the reinforcing steel out of the concrete and sent it to be remade into new. I think they managed somewhere between 70 and 80% of the whole building was recycled.

Who are addresspollution and copi.org.uk (with its faux government logos and name) ?

Both conceal their domain registration (that costs money, most legit organisations put their head office), one implies a connection with IC when its actually just scraping data.

Worth noting that they seem to be domains used by a lobby/advertising agency which may explain their tenuous grip on facts. They are not unusual - plenty of organisations on both sides use this approach to scrape data made available to the public to tweak and spin in this way. The Guardian seems to get most of its facts these days from such spun sources - I remember when it used to be a good, well researched left leaning serious paper instead of competing to be the left's DM.

If you live in a city and want just the aesthetic appeal of a real fire then get a bio ethanol fire.

It's cleaner and a lot less hassle than lugging logs around.

You're wrong there. The affordable particulate counting modules came about a few years ago (initially as sensors for home projects using RaspberryPi etc) & are the exact same ones incorporated into cheaper particulate monitors.

They are excellent, easily accurate to make deterministic statements from, and also easily testable at home - lighting a match in the same room as my monitor throws the particulate readings up 100x in a few minutes.
You don;t need fully calibrated equipment - All you need to be able to compare is your indoor air quality without a burner on, vs with it on. For that they are perfect and far exceed the resolution required to see what's going on.

Every study you read regarding wood burners and indoor air quality will have some agenda behind it, or concern incorrectly functioning burners, or burning the wrong fuels etc etc.

Im sure my monitor would be absolute accurate if it showed huge levels of particulates in my living room.......

Its only inaccurate because it doesnt show that.

@FurierTransform @bellac11 www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/indoor-wood-stoves-release-harmful-emissions-our-homes-study-finds this is a very small study but still more accurate than "1 person off the internet" self-reporting stuff ....or are you saying you don't believe their particulate readings?

I love reading these woodburner threads , it really brings out all the eco kranks 🤓. Im sitting in front of ours and its lovely 🔥🪵

@Diyextension

I don't think it is necessarily eco krank'ish to point out that wood burning stoves create air pollution.

Indeed air quality in many alpine ski resort villages in winter is worse than a lot of industrial Chinese villages.

I am also sat here feeding two wood burning stoves and making sure they don't go out which to be honest is a right pain in the ass rather than a cosy experience. And I am doing it in order to keep the (old and cold) house and DC warm even though they have two duvets on each, because using gas fired heating is simply unaffordable whereas the wood is free (albeit with a shit load of labour).

Time for governments to start cracking down on these things; as with passive smoking and drink-driving, simply waiting for people to do the right (and healthy) thing clearly isn't working.

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!

Long-term, though, the UK needs to be insulating and retro fitting properties on a massive scale.

I do think that as word gets out about how bad these things are, it is going to gradually make people more reluctant to live in those properties that are impossible to insulate and revamp sufficiently to make woodburners a thing of the past, and I wonder how this will affect the prices of old and cold buildings in rural areas going forward. We're going to start hearing muttering about "The thing that worries me about this house [that we're looking at] is, the owners admit that it's basically impossible to stay warm enough in the winter without a wood burner, and we all know how bad those are for your health...."

A really well engineered, new technology wood chip or grain burner like the ones that heat houses in Sweden.
They use renewable resources, like wood, but are more efficient and have fewer emissions.

Affordable heating of houses is essential for life.