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

Yes, but so many people have been replying that it’s their only source of heat and how very much colder it is in their rural homes. It just makes me feel sorry for them, I can’t help it.

Having to use wood or coal to keep warm doesn’t come across as aspirational or luxury to me. Underfloor heating - that seems more like luxury.

I hope this country can find a better, cleaner, cheaper way to heat people’s old houses in the future. Perhaps solar panels will get better.

Who said anything about aspirational or luxury? It's just a fact - I don't think you need to feel sad!

Hold on, I'll be back in a minute. Just need to throw another log on the fire.

having to use wood or coal to keep warm doesn't come across as aspirational or luxury to me

...

(blinks)

I suppose some of us have different priorities.

Oh dear, your lack of credible assertions is hilarious. People won’t be persuaded by nonsense!

Oooh and me, it's chilly here today and it's great not to have to put the central heating on.

@Turtlesgottaturtle you are being completely ridiculous. We are living in a cost-of-living crisis. We get free Wood and have our stove on as much as possible to keep the gas bill down.

Today it is really chilly here. Log burner has just gone on to warm the whole house up. Very dry wood. Seasoned for 2 years and from a reputable source. Not burning treated wood. All Scottish and sourced locally. Plus, it makes me happy.

What OP (and the Greens) fail to realise is that their suggestions may be perfectly valid for some houses, but totally inappropriate for others.

Take heat pumps. Fine in a modern, well insulated property. Will never ever work in a 3rd floor tenement with a permanent draught issue.

And log burners. Get lost with your artisanal middle class affectations in Stockbridge. You’re making peoples asthma far worse. Those living 10 miles from anywhere and are snowed / blocked in by fallen trees in for a month a year - crack on.

Blanket national bans don’t work.

How would it be policed -we have a wood burner and there is no smoke as the logs are aged and dry

Great that it make you happy, but not so great that significant amounts of research suggests it can potentially severely harm the health of any neighbours 🤷‍♀️ I really do hope they ban them

I said plus. The reasons we have it are heat and cooking in power cuts. Also it replaced an open coal fire which is more harmful and less efficient.

I bloody hope not.
we live in an old, cold house and cannot afford to have the heating on for any more hours a day than we already do in winter to heat it up, we rely on our fire and wood burner. Our gas and electricity bills in winter are £280 a month, we can’t afford more than that.

I live in London and I’m fed up of smelling smoke in my house from my neighbour’s log burner. The prevailing west wind blows the smoke toward us and I keep having to close the bathroom window because it stinks. The same for the garage and conservator, and outside in general.
Log burners should be banned in built up areas especially where gas is available.
My husband has suspected lesions in his lungs which are being investigated at the moment.

Some of us who are rural rely on them as a source of heat. We have no access to mains gas and have a free source of logs.
The newest log burners have catalytic converters to reduce pollution.
Oh and I costed out a heat pump for our house- the payback time would be around 50 years.

Nobody has suggested a national blanket ban. It is possible to produce legislation which differentiates between different areas / circumstances. Can anyone think of a good reason why our cities and towns shouldn't have a ban imposed? Do the inhabitants of Glasgow and Edinburgh live in fear of dying of cold due to a power cut?

In London a while back researchers calculated that each woodburner cost the NHS £800 a year. That's pushing the NHS closer to collapse, with even longer waiting lists. And all that unnecessary suffering of those whose health is impacted, with thousands of extra deaths a year caused by woodburners in the UK alone. It was just in the paper today about woodburner smoke substantially increasing the risk of alzheimers, and that's just one impact out of many, including different types of cancer, not just in the lungs.

Why is it okay for people to do this to their neighbours, and to their own children? Why should your neighbour get cancer, and/or alzheimers, because you enjoy curling up next to your woodburner?

As for those who say that woodburners should be installed and then used only if there's a power cut - there's no way in hell that people would stick to that. It's pretty clear from this thread that many people are fiercely attached to their woodburner - for comfort, in some cases cost and, dare I say it, status reasons. They're not going to spend a great deal of money installing one and then use it once a year when there's a power cut, are they? These are people who are blocking thoughts of the impacts on their own health and that of their children - that's how much those wood burners mean to them. We need government action.

Exactly so. I am 3 miles from the largest town in Perthshire. No mains gas here. I will be putting in a log burner as soon as I can find somebody to remove my utterly failed Aga. I chose LPG over oil back when we bought this house 39 years ago, it has been great, very efficient but no good in one of the many power cuts.

Not a reason to insist that there should be no ban of wood burners in Perth, is it though? Let alone Edinburgh and Glasgow. And sadly the fact that you experience power shortages won't stop the smoke that you'll be producing both inside and outside the house from damaging your family's health, so here's hoping you only use the wood burner during power cuts rather than using it as your main source of heating.
I was driving through a large town yesterday, a very hot day so had the car window open, and guess what, someone was using their wood burner.

I am nowhere near Perth. Nor have I insisted that there shouldn't be a ban there. People in Perth have access to mains gas, after all, as do the citizens of Blairgowrie which is the largest town in Perthshire since Perth became a city.

Bit of a side note but I’d recommend Alan Melville for all things Aga including removal. It’s not a big operation but he’s very reliable.

https://alanmelville.co.uk/contact-us/

Ha spoken like a person who has never had power cuts lasting multiple days during winter storm season (the longest being 6 days in minus temps with snow on the ground!)

Our wood burner is most definitely necessary as in many places outside the central belt big cities. You have to be a lot more resilient and self sufficient including heat generation when it takes days to get power back!

I imsgine it’s almost impossible to police in homes with an existing log burner, but it’s a no brainer to ban them in LEZs, for example. Put the onus on fitters not to install them.

For anyone debating right now whether or not to install one, won’t the situation in Hormuz be a factor in the balance, ie risk of much higher future energy costs?

I would say the cost of seasoned firewood has gone up dramatically in the last few years. Buying by the cubic metre you’d be lucky to pay under £100 quid. If you live somewhere urban without storage and just buying odd bags it’s really expensive working out at about £1 per kilo of hardwood. It’d be cheaper to heat with gas.

I do think when considering future energy costs the benefits are really for rural dwellers who have barns and storage to buy in bulk/ take advantage of windfall/ manage own trees. I can’t imagine there’s many folk in Stockbridge who own a chainsaw, a wood splitter and storage for 20-30 cubic meter of wood. Which is roughly what you need to run a decent sized home on wood you are sourcing yourself.

Call for ban on log burners and wood burner fireplaces in homes

I live in a semi-rural 11 year old house and the main heating is oil based. It also came with a wood burner in the main lounge but we have never lit it once and don't intend to.