Wood burners - will the SNP and Greens please finally ban them?

[Turtlesgottaturtle]

In my view banning wood-burning stoves should be seen as an urgent priority for the new Scottish government. I don't know why people have to have the right to cause serious everyday pollution to their neighbours, simply to produce heat in their living room, when other options are available and already installed in their homes. Where I live there's almost always a smell of smoke and there's often a thick smog. Smoke gets into other people's houses even if they never open a window - for example if your windows and doors let in any air at all, which they do. Often, if you step outside your front door it's like standing next to a bonfire, and smoke immediately gets into your house through the briefly opened door. You can't use your garden if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, unless you're happy to breathe in smoke.

I'll link to an article on the incredibly high level of pollution produced by these wood-burning stoves:
"Even a modern, approved, “eco-friendly” wood burner produces 750 times as many fine particulates as a heavy goods vehicle. - These poisons can affect every organ in the body. Tiny particles pass straight through your lungs into the bloodstream. Wherever they lodge they cause harm. They’re associated with a wide range of cancers, heart and lung disease, strokes, dementia and the loss of intelligence. They age your skin and damage your liver. They harm foetuses in the womb and children’s development."

Things have moved on since he wrote that article. Wood-burning stoves are not now restricted to the upper middle classes. I live in a working-class area and I'd say that every second house has one of these stoves. We have plenty of cheap wood in Scotland. Some people use their wood burner all day and half the night. And it's getting worse, quickly. No thought seems to be given to the fact that this affects not just the house owners but also the neighbours.

I think wood burners have become an obsession for a lot of people, so politicians won't act. Of course, the NHS won't remotely be able to cope with the impact.

Burning Shame – George Monbiot

I hope not anytime soon, it’s a life saver for us when the power is off or when we are having to hold off on getting oil and waiting for the cost to drop when the price becomes unaffordable for us.

Maybe you missed this part of my post:

"Even a modern, approved, “eco-friendly” wood burner produces 750 times as many fine particulates as a heavy goods vehicle. - These poisons can affect every organ in the body. Tiny particles pass straight through your lungs into the bloodstream. Wherever they lodge they cause harm. They’re associated with a wide range of cancers, heart and lung disease, strokes, dementia and the loss of intelligence. They age your skin and damage your liver. They harm foetuses in the womb and children’s development."

Even if this doesn't affect your family personally as you have no neighbours with wood burners: a) that could change in the future, b) what effect do you think this is having and will in the future have on NHS Scotland?

Let's focus on towns, villages and cities where people are not reliant on oil and where everyone has lots of close neighbours.

Before log burners, people had stoves with back boilers that heated radiators, or they had open fires. Both used either coal or wood. Plenty still do. Nothing has changed OP.
I grew up in a house heated by a coke boiler and open fires. I still have a school age child.

And yes, if you had ever spent 5 days with no heat or light in mid-winter, you would know the dangers. Why don't you try it OP?

Again, if appropriate areas which are oil only could be excluded from the legislation.

Not just oil. The houses in our village use a variety of coal, wood and LPG with some using electricity only.

So your thread title should have been 'Wood burners - will the SNP and Greens please finally ban them in cities and towns' (my bolds).

Because the Scottish Greens and SNP do have a bit of a habit of suggesting legislation which will work beautifully in high population cities and towns with access to facilities/public transport/access to mains gas but do not take into account the challenges/impossibilities of imposing such legislation for those who live rurally.

I've tried it for a few days in cold mid-winter when my boiler broke down and I had no electric oil-filled radiator (which I subsequently bought). Lots of good quality blankets, snuggling up with family if you've got them, etc. Light isn't a big issue for a few days - emergency battery lamps and candles. All of that is easily affordable if you can afford a wood burner. I also have a small flame stove which can be used to heat up food in an emergency.

If we use this argument to justify everyone, including in our towns and cities, having a wood burner and using it all day every day then we are truly fucked healthwise. Is that what you want for Scotland's children? They will be the worst affected, growing up with this. We need to do an intelligent comparison of risks. Just because you can't see the effect of smoke on people doesn't mean it's not happening, day after day.

I have the M60 running past me.

Everyone who has a car should give it up before the people who use a woodburner give their heat source up,

Any grown-up government would of course get professional research done on where banning wood burners would make sense and where it wouldn't. And at least people who care about their family's health and are affected by neighbours' smoke could then make the decision to move into an area where a ban is in place. At the moment, you can move house and a week after you move you can find that your neighbour is retiring and installing a wood burner which will be in use for 15 hours a day.

Very funny. I assume they built the M60 after you moved into your house?

And: ""Even a modern, approved, “eco-friendly” wood burner produces 750 times as many fine particulates as a heavy goods vehicle."

In towns and cities, there are far superior alternatives to wood-burning stoves as a form of heating. Is that the case for cars on a motorway?

Do you have any tips?

Off-grid can be excluded. There's no reason why every single house in the country has to be covered by this.

I think in rural areas that dont have mains gas and high fuel prices this wont be popular.
As many have said already older properties in rural areas will want to continue to use log burners. I live in an old georgian house hard and expensive to heat in a rural location with no near neighbours and i do have a log burner that i use in the winter we have plenty of wood due to storm damage this year which we store carefully and season, I use sparingly ,keep it well maintained and never in the summer .
I dont intent to stop using it .

I suspect that for many the shift to wood burners is to do with lifestyle aspirations. I accept that for some it is motivated by price.
What I do to keep energy costs down in cold weather is to buy warm clothes and to wear layers.
I don't have any heating on at night and use a good thick duvet, a good blanket and a hot water bottle.

If you're still cold or you don't like wearing layers, then assuming you have electricity you can use an electric throw or an electric blanket. They're cheap to run. And rather than heating the whole house you can have an oil-filled electric radiator in the living room or a child's bedroom. But wearing layers (eg with a thermal vest, a really warm wool jumper, good warm socks) makes an enormous difference.

They'd lose a lot of votes if they tried this.

I'm in Fife. I had a couple of overgrown trees removed by a local tree surgeon. The men doing the job were inundated by enquiries from passers by, asking if they could take the wood.

As I've already said many times, one rule doesn't have to fit all. If wood burners were made illegal in cities, towns and large villages where gas is available, that would cover the great majority of the population and would enable people in other areas to choose to move to a smoke free area if they wanted to.

I live in a little house and still can’t get it much above that. We are in a town but still get power cuts. Secondary sources are invaluable.

Never seen smog caused by log burners 😆

You're right that wood burners are very popular. The impression I get is that some (not all) people really do fall in love with them. It wouldn't be easy for the government to ban them in large villages, towns and cities, but if they care about people and about the future of NHS Scotland they need to get started on this. Publicising scientifically verified evidence of the health risks would be a good place to start.

It's hard to believe that people don't at least know something about the dangers of wood burners, but I think some people really don't. Surely the government should as a minimum be warning people? Users of wood burners are damaging their own health and their children's health as well as the health of their neighbours.

Wouldn’t you prefer a wood tax?

You've never lived in a house heated by a coal fire with a back boiler when the fire has been out for a couple of days, have you OP?

There are many areas that have regular power cuts, our weather can be very harsh, we need to be able to heat and eat in them! So far this year our village was off for 5 days in January, 3 in both February and March and 2 x 2 days in April. Each time my stove gave us warmth and I cooked on it too. We buy a trailer full of local tree trunks at a time, split them ourselves, season them, get the stove serviced twice a year. What do you actually suggest families like us do without stoves/fires?

Let's make a start on the biggest issue, shall we? And on the larger centres of population, where most people live and where they are less likely to freeze to death due to a long term power cut.
There are things that can be done if there's a power cut at a time when it's extremely cold. Maybe it would be worth looking into those things rather than accepting that there's going to be a huge increase in cancer, strokes, dementia and all the rest of it, permanently, across the whole of Scotland.
Just off the top of my head, one generator for the village hall, where elderly people could congregate with emergency bedding. Or village halls to be equipped with wood burners which can be used in power cut situations. But how often does this situation actually happen in Scotland's cities and towns?

my woodburner is fitted in my fireplace where the old backboiler coal fire was
(we took it out)

pleas define "towns and cities" such that your utopian ideal of limiting other people's options would work

I've lived for a few days in very cold temperatures with the boiler not working and with no electric heating. Wearing warm clothes makes an enormous difference. As does good bedding.