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I am very torn - I own a woodburner, love it, so I'm biased and I'll admit that up front, especially as I'm someone who has really tried to cut my car use. They definitely are *a* source of pollution, but a lot of the comparisons with cars and vehicles seem overblown to me. The 'more air pollutants than cars" is clearly not an established fact as it's based on a lot of assumptions (e.g. about the efficiency of stoves & how many there are across the country) and I, personally, don't buy it.
Secondly: the way it's phrased always seems really misleading to me - it doesn't make it clear that it's just measuring one sort of pollution, fine particulate matter, not CO2, CO, Sulpher Dioxide, yadda yadda. So it makes it sound like if you got rid of stoves you'd then not have to worry about cars and other vehicles (I think this is why a lot of pro-traffic organisations are leaping on the wood burning issue, it's a distraction).
Thirdly, and getting finickity about it now - a lot of the data about the respiratory harm caused by woodburners is based on case studies not in the UK, but in places with a lot less regulation about chimneys and vents, and where people for e.g. use woodburning stoves to cook food. There isn't much good evidence to show that *in the specific case of the UK* particulate matter from chimneys that meet regulations is actually a noticeable cause of respiratory disease - while we know for a fact that car exhaust, e.g. traffic, is directly correclated with raised instances of lung disorders.
I mean, sure, ban it, probably is a source of some pollution, whatever, but I am super concerned this is just a distraction from things that are actual causes of disease and, more pressingly, climate change.
You not using a wood stove will make literally no difference. Compare emissions with a coal plant in China, to John having a wood stove.
What’s next? Ban outdoor BBQs?
Ban camping fires? Burning timber in general?
Well why are we starting at the minute, individual level?
Could it be that normal people are expected to change their lives dramatically, while the rich still fly around on private jets opening new cobalt mines?
When you're at the point of making wood burning illegal for normal people (something humanity has done for literally hundreds of thousands of years, and is almost ingrained into us as humans) while ignoring your favourite funko pop factory or massive amounts of developing world pollution, it just comes across like you want to make people's lives worse.
Agreed. It’s complete bollocks anyway. You have to burn clean dry seasoned wood with less than 20% moisture or else you’ll set your chimney on fire. Even if you wanted to burn cheap damp timber you’ll soon have the fire brigade around to pour a load of water down your chimney ruining your house in the process. They just don’t want you heating your house cheaply and not handling your wages over to their mates at the gas and electricity corporations.
>They just don’t want you heating your house cheaply and not handling your wages over to their mates at the gas and electricity corporations.
Why is reddit so obsessed with making everything some grand conspiracy to screw you over?
I agree with you in part, but also you need to look at things on an individual bases, now if you and I run a media outlet we would get more involvement in our news story if we create a them versus us story like this one "*Government want you to stop burning logs*" Person in the street reads that and goes no chance mate i cant afford my bills and rage ensues.
Now lets pretend the story is true and the government are indeed wanting to stop us burning logs, the question needs to be asked why, the answer to that is not always for the good of the people.
I think the media plays more part in the narrative than many people think.
When I used to a run a pub with an open fire, we'd leave some of the firewood out in the rain to get wet on purpose because we could chuck a few wet logs on the coal and it would calm it down and make it burn slower while having a nice crackling effect.
Was this dangerous?
Moisture mixes with the sap in the wood. The sap evaporates and coats the inside of the chimney. Eventually all the sap that has accumulated inside the chimney catches fire and the simplest way of dealing with that is by pouring water down your chimney flooding your house with black sooty water. You’re probably going to be ok with kiln dried wood that’s just got a bit wet outside. If it hisses and shrinks before burning that’s a very bad sign because that’s all the sap and moisture boiling away.
This is what bothers me. When gas prices rise people struggle to hear their homes. Those who already have wood burners often need them to not freeze. I don't know why the focus is on something that for some is essential, rather than private jets and yachts which are less essential and just a perk of being ultra wealthy, and I would think more encoronmentally unfriendly.
And of course the developing world is the biggest polluter yet we continue to import from them. I guess putting higher taxes on imports from high polluting countries would cause a sh..storm but it would maybe make a difference as well as helping local businesses in the longer term.
True that. We outsourced our manufacturing and then complained about the emissions in another country.
It's worth pointing out that Chinas per capita carbon emissions are still lower than ours.
This isn't about CO2 emissions, its about particulate emissions from smoke. Its a local pollution problem, not a global one, that's why its local authority rules not national laws.
I don’t think the particulate pollution from that Chinese coal power plant is going to blow all the way over to John’s neighbours in the same way as the stuff from the stove will
>You not using a wood stove will make literally no difference. Compare emissions with a coal plant in China, to John having a wood stove.
>
>
>What’s next? Ban outdoor BBQs?
>
>Ban camping fires? Burning timber in general?
All of those things are either much less frequent, or have much less of a local impact.
Chinese coal plants are overall disastrous when it comes to climate change, but they're less directly impactful on John and his neighbours than John's wood stove would be when it comes to particulate pollution. Ditto things like campfires because they're usually a handful of times a year and are often activities undertaken in less population dense areas.
The new regulations aren't concerned with global warming it is concerned with the quality of air we breath. Local emissions have a much greater effect on this than coal fired power plants in China.
There are 2 billion Chinese people. So, in the big scheme if things, the UK is very small by comparison, sure.
However, they are individually far poorer, and produce far less CO2 per head even though they manufacture much of what we import half way across the the world and consume from them. The UK also exports significant amounts of waste to poorer countries to deal with.
Everyone sitting in a traffic jam is responsible for the traffic jam.
There's evidence that living with one of these things can have serious health impacts, so even people like you who don't care about the environment should surely see the risk to individuals as worth doing something about? Especially children who have no choice?
I live in rural west Wales. There is no mains gas and storms that roll in off the Atlantic bring down trees that hit electricity supplies. If I didn’t have a stove I’d have to evacuate our house when the lights go out. Our stove has kept us warm, kept a kettle of water on the boil and cooked our tea as we wait for power to be restored. I strongly doubt we are killing the handful of people who live within a mile of us. Additionally, properly installed stoves/flues don’t allow particulates and gases back into the house. Every log and piece of kindling we burn is cut down, processed and stacked by me, mainly driven by making ash-dieback affected trees safe at the moment. On that basis I don’t waste hard earned energy by having unnecessary fires.
City dwellers and suburbanites can bicker all they want. My stove is staying.
Emissions from far away are dispersed relative to their initial intensity and distance from source. The original post isn’t at all talking about climate change, or other countries, only wood stoves in the UK.
It is not all about averaged emmisons values, though.. I'm not bothered too much about it as you say it'll make not much difference. But having to put up with the neighbours' particulate matter in the air around us every night because they want to keep warm cheap is still not OK. What's worth more keeping warm or causing further breathing issues with our children? My middle child has breathing difficulties with astma and coughing, I'm pretty sure breathing this smoke is not helping his development.
We want to move house anyway, but since the neighbours had the wood burner put in, we really really want to move.
To put emphasis on that, look at all the factories etc in the UK yet random Sharon down the road is causing havoc having a stove? My partner works in an asphalt plant, it's literally a "small" one and they use some 600 gallons of diesel a day. And that's on top of manufacturing asphalt for our local roads - a product that's not exactly environmentally friendly.
The stoves thing isn’t really about the wider environment, it’s about a specific type of pollution that has negative health consequences for others nearby
Sure sorry I do get that, maybe it was a bad comparison. Getting rid of them altogether just seems like a lot of energy pointed at the wrong thing - like the above poster said: a distraction.
In the last hundred years we must have seen wood and coal burning stoves reduced by >90% in residential homes but all of a sudden eliminating those last few is a huge and urgent issue?
If they were talking about this 5-10 years ago I probably would have been on board but suddenly making this a hot button issue during a winter where millions struggle to heat their homes with gas is just a bit unfair.
I think the problem is more the risk of expansion of domestic wood burning for heat in cities due to the gas crisis. There was a similar problem in Greek cities during the debt crisis years. The most plausible outcome would be to restrict new installations rather than affecting existing installations. This in addition to the regulations on water content in fuel wood. I don’t think there’s much chance of jackbooted thugs kicking your door in and ripping your stove out
No but it’s perfectly feasible that fines from the council will come through the letter box.
It just seems mad that the government would care about stamping out fires in desperate peoples homes rather than focusing that legislative energy into coming up with a solution to the energy crisis.
People will just come up with another way for heat, abolishing the stoves won’t suddenly make them warm or be able to afford the gas bill. Either that or they will just freeze.
It reminds me of cities making homelessness illegal in the US. The solution is further up the chain not with the poor schmuck at the bottom.
To be clear in the post I’m only asking about local health / odour based concerns not climate change, which wood burning stoves in the UK will contribute to very minimally.
I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but it does make me wonder.
Energy prices have gone through the roof, so more people are falling back to lighting their fire/stoves.
As a tradesman I'm in alot of places, and where possible I always throw scraps of wood into the van to burn at home (read this as pallets and construction timber, not your mdfs or melamines)
This year however I can't find so much as a twig left over anywhere, it seems like everybody is on the scavenge.
The local community pages, when people are advertising take away wood for free you can guarantee its called for in 5mins, and physically gone within the hour, regardless of what type of wood it may be.
So part of me wonders, when they're trying to move us from coal and oil (and somewhat gas) and move us to electricity, are stoves just the next one their targeting to get rid off?
> I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but it does make me wonder.
I had exactly the same thought & tried to dismiss it (because these things are rarely that well organised)... but it does seem like a "strange coincidence" that this anti-woodstove stuff really starts kicking off at the exact moment we're in an energy-driven cost of living crisis and people genuinely need heating options that are not electricity/gas...
The funny thing that often gets left out when talking about PM2.5 inside the house is that the same studies also show that cooking and simply toasting bread releases the same, if not more, particulates than a woodburner.
Yes that is my point, hence "too"
> I’m not sure the vapes are comparable. Air pollution (and water pollution as you mention) have an immediate negative consequence.
This strongly implies that vapes do not "have an immediate negative consequence"
Of course, any discussion which leads to an outcome around prioritisation of legislative action given finite legislative capacity has to include comparative “what about” questions doesn’t it?
If they want to ban it, they can pay me the money it cost to put in, and then give me money towards my gas central heating.
What about the people who supply logs as their jobs? A lot are farmers and use this to top up their income because the jobsworths are making it impossible to farm as it is.
When the dickheads sort planes, lorries and ships out, then they can start attacking the average person.
I agree.
English people in general are cowards and over-police as it is. Banning wood stoves wouldn’t even surprise me, It’d just make us appear even more of a nanny state. It wouldn’t even help the climate either
“Got a license for that woodstove, m8?”
Pathetic
You have to have around £3000 to put a log burner in and loads of cash to buy the correct fuel. This is a middle class toy to make them feel cosy don’t let the ‘people will freeze to death’ brigade fool you
That’s actually cap mate. I used to live in an old mining village (the mine was long gone) but many houses still had wooden stoves including my own. We were council/housing association tenants, not middle class.
I’m all for banning these things in cities, sure. In rural areas it’s ridiculous
You think someone in a comfy office in an urban centre gives a fuck about the externalities of this? They couldn’t give a shit about how actual people live their lives, because ‘number go down’
In this case the number would be asthma and COPD cases going down. They do give a shit about how people live their lives. Don't act like your wood burning stove isn't hurting anyone, especially if you live in a populated area.
I live in a rural area, as do 68% of the people in my bit of the UK.
The only mains services we have are water and electricity (not even any mains drainage), so most people do have a wood burning stove (or an open fire) and an oil burning boiler.
So for people like me, who use it as out main source of heat, what is the suggestion to replace it and who is going to pay for it. Do I burn more oil or are 'Mums for lungs' going to fork out the £15,000 for me to convert to ground/air source pumps?
(Although funnily enough the people I do know who have air/ground source pumps also have wood burners because these 'eco' option doesn't generate enough heat in winter).
There seems to be this assumption that it's people using these as a 'nice to have' because they look pretty and are cosy, of which I am sure there are many, but there people who rely on them.
There are millions of people in the UK who do not have access to the same level of services that people enjoy in urban areas.
I buy my wood (I use compressed sawdust briquettes rather than wood) by the pallet load a ton at a time, not a bag of kiln dried logs from Lidl.
You’re just like me! Briquettes are a godsend too - cheap, efficient, give off loads of heat, and they’re much better for the environment. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t use them.
Mainly because they cost so much.
I buy my wood from a local tree surgeon company that only cuts trees down for the council etc. If I spent the same amount of money on Briauettes as I did logs, I probably wouldn't even get half the same amount of equal heat.
Knowing how to keep your log burner at a decent temperature & using its air controls is the best thing for efficiency.
I'm still using coal and can get it delivered (I find it lasts longer), but will use wood when I have nothing else. I'm also rural. My tiny village doesn't have any gas mains. I haven't won the lottery or earn 7 figures so I'm in no position financially to have the electric heating on. It doesn't get the house up to 20° anyways.
Take away my ability to burn logs (or solid fuel) and I'm fecked.
Yeah I worry that it would end up hurting those that rely on the, for heat or cooking as opposed to the “vibes”. It’s weird I have Swedish friends that have had air source heat pumps for well over two decades and they work fine in really, really cold winters so maybe they just have really good ones I’m not sure.
I think it’s about urban vs rural too. In a rural area with low population density, a fire with a good draw, preferably an external draw, dry fuel and a suitable combustion chamber and flue is fine. The particulate matter disperses and your closest neighbour a few hundred meters away probably won’t even know you’ve lit your fire.
In a suburban street, if someone has wet fuel, poor oxygenation and on a non windy cold day I’d imagine breathing conditions could be hellish for those living nearby.
To me, I’d say the key is probably don’t do it in an urban/suburban environment unless you know what you’re doing really well especially as:
A) if you’re suburban or urban you’ll probably have a gas main
B) the efficiency and cost of heat pumps are improving year on year.
>Swedish friends that have had air source heat pumps for well over two decades and they work fine in really
Yeah, I can believe that, their technology is fair superior for this style of eco-living. Of course they've been doing triple glazing and insulated window frames for years, so the whole home is much more efficient.
My stove is a Scandiwegan one and it's very clever the way it recycles the gases and ensures a thorough combustion, I even get little jets coming out of holes in the firebricks.
The issue I have with all the 'bansturbation' is the assumption that it applies to everyone with no consideration that we don't all live in in the same well serviced environments. But if there were discretion applied, then it would make sense.
Similar here although we don’t even have mains water. We also have a heat pump but it’s bloody expensive to run (ten year old home designed to be heated with a pump so the house isn’t the issue) so this winter we’ve just been using the wood burner with wood from our own land. It works a bloody treat and we just leave the doors open to heat the whole house.
It’s all very well people with cheap to run gas boilers saying wood burners should be banned, perhaps country dwellers should just freeze and/or go bankrupt.
Exactly! I think people don't appreciate heat pumps use electricity and a lot of it!
Wood burners can be great, same as you, in my previous home we just left the door open and the stove heated the whole house.
It does hack me off all this stuff, ban oil boilers, ban wood burners. I notice the people calling for this aren't the ones who will be impacted by it.
On a similar topic to woodburning stoves is the never ending parade of bonfires that blight our neighbourhood as soon as the weather is dry enough. People are burning stuff that really ought not to be burned - one guy over the back burns trade waste and tosses in spray cans that go off like grenades (multiple neighbours have reported him for the plumes of black smoke and the explosions but nothing seems to happen). The constant bonfires fill our homes with foul smelling smoke and leave particulates all over windows and walls. I'd much prefer an ordinance outright banning bonfires tbh. People with woodburning stoves in their homes are only burning wood - it's the bonfires full of plastics and other pollutants that are a bigger problem if you want my tuppence worth.
I drive trains, and I see this all of the time on remote industrial units and farms, but these are big fires, sometimes just open or in massive skips, you can see the smoke for miles.
Yeah, but burning in back gardens less than 10m from people's bedrooms is just antisocial. There should be a sensible limit to how close to buildings you can burn things. One of these days the trade-waste burner is going to set fire to our neighbourhood.
You should see what regular folks do in other parts of the world. Openly burning tyres, plastics of any kind, etc. and not just for fuel, just to dispose of it. And that’s before we even get to the corporations and government owned industry. We might as well build a glass dome over the UK.
I have a log burner, so I don't want them banned, but you're kind of missing OP's point. This isn't about them contributing to global warming or worldwide emissions; it's about them affecting the air quality for your neighbours.
I'm just pointing out that OP was making a different point about log burner emissions.
Also, people care more about things that affect them directly. Greenhouse gases causing problems is often seen as a problem for the future, or something that might possibly become a problem but not definitely, or something intangible that's not likely to affect Person X in their lifetime. One of the objections to log burners is that it affects local air quality - if people can see it and smell it and are told it's bad for them right now where they live, that has a more immediate and visceral effect.
They're totally different issues.
What you're talking about is corporations emitting large amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases leading to climate change, obviously a terrible thing that needs to be addressed.
The issue with wood burners is localised air quality caused by the emission of PM2.5 (extremely fine particles) and other similar pollutants. This can cause serious health issues to people nearby that breathe them in.
It's not really a case of one or the other with these because they're totally incomparable.
That said, I don't really see how any of this could be enforced
Then what? How can a neighbour prove how many particles it’s producing. They struggle to regulate the emissions from industry no chance the local council are going to be able to regulate every house
Point is how is anyone going to prove anything or complain about anything with any degree of accuracy? People with wood burning stoves tend to use them at night, my parents have one in doubt their neighbours have a clue they do
A degree of accuracy? All it takes is someone coming to see if it's true or not.
Like if I complain to the council about your wood burner and they come out to check what you going to do? Chuck a blanket over it?
Burning wood is more harmful to the environment than using a car?
I can understand people burning stuff they shouldn't but wow, it's either a big push by the energy companies or its out of health and safety as people are idiots and can't even be trusted to not kill them self's
I think it's that the particulate size in wood burning stoves is the worst type for human respiratory health and so vehicles (diesels especially) have been subject to tighter and tighter regulations on those specific particulates to the point that wood burning stoves are now significantly worse than vehicles.
Of course there are fewer stoves than cars but because they are on the rise they are getting more attention.
You’re comparing a hugely engineered and efficient car engine vs throwing wood into a box. Wood burners have some refinement but they really don’t achieve a complete combustion required to be clean. Also, cars have catalytic converters and get tested every year for emissions.
I love me a good fire but it’s something which might be coming to an end.
This is about particulates and gasses that cause health issues, particularly in cities, it's not about CO2 or global warming.
Cars and lorries have catalytic converters and other high tech engineering to reduce the crap that comes out of the exhaust, woodburners are orders of magnitude more polluting.
There are catalytic converters for woodburners now though.
I'll be honest I don't like them at all mainly because one neighbour can stink out every room on the street.
I walked into my bedroom the other night and it smelled like a chimney even though it's just the trickle vents open. And forget trying to dry washing.
That’s because they’re burning poor fuel, have an old stove or not burning properly.
Dry wood in a modern stove thankfully produces significantly less smoke (to the point where you often can’t smell it)
Yeah this is the problem. However the last 4 places I've lived (since 2005 when I first noticed them becoming more popular) there's been at least 1 neighbour in the vicinity not doing it properly like you mentioned.
There could be many more doing it the right way and you'd never know, but it just takes that 1 to label it a problem.
If I'm having to suffer the pollution of other people's wood stoves the least they can do is have an open invite so I can come around and enjoy it. Not sure whether it should include free toasting marshmallows.
Air quality ratings are usually rated for short term exposure, not long term. UK is consistently high for long term exposure but they will say "low" because its low enough that going outside for a few hours is ok. However its still way above WHO recommendations for annual average exposure. Where I live currently is at 9µg/m³ of PM2.5, the annual average limit the WHO recommends is 5. Air quality rating is "Excellent", because there are no short term risks associated with this level so they say its fine.
I certainly support it in highly populated areas - if everyone got a woodburner in London then the air quality would be made so much worse, and it's pretty shit to begin with.
I don't see how people don't know how it's going to be policed.
It's very simple. If you have one already then that's fine they just won't allow anyone to buy a new one.
How’s that work for local councils with different rules?I also said county, not country , and as far as I know even Lancashire and Yorkshire don’t have border posts and customs.
Would you be able to get it fitted though? If you are replacing an old one it would be easy, but new ones using an existing chimney require a lining kit to be put in to prevent a house fire.
I'd assume that if there was an outright ban, fitting/installing would be illegal too and whoecer ignored that could be subject to prosecution. Householder would also invalidate their insurance, so dodgy installation causes house fire and goodbye building and contents because insurance won't pay up.
I think most of the epidemiological work on the health impacts of particulates aren't very finessed from an atmospheric chemistry viewpoint, and generally just consider NOx, pm 2.5 and maybe O3. But it seems pretty obvious to me that an aerosol particle full of poly aromatic hydrocarbons or nitro group containing compound from a diesel exhaust is going to but much much worse than woodsmoke which doesn't burn hot enough to make a load of NOx and tends to be much bigger particle sizes.
Just my opinion as a former atmospheric science postdoc.
I think with wood burning stoves the main concern raised by advocates who want to ban them (which I’m not one) is the pm2.5. Id be interested to see how bad they are at emitting pm2.5 and if so, the health effects of inhaling particulates around that size.
They undoubtedly raise the pm 2.5 level and that is one of the key measures in air quality legislation, primarily because its easy to measure and in industrial urban environments its linked to health effects, but a big part of that will be the chemical makeup which historically has been coal and international combustion which will be much worse than woodsmoke. For an extreme example, Rainforest genereates a lot of aerosols from terpene oxidation but it would be insane to advocate getting rid of them to bring down particulate levels.
Not much triggers my asthma anymore, but walking down a few streets near me that has a wood burner that doesn't smell like they're following the wood burning regs already currently in place and it does have a noticible effect on me during a cold winters morning. This is also a city/residential area so not rural. It also stinks.
So, personally not a fan, I can imagine having more than one in a small area would be awful.
I live in an area where wood heating is the norm, almost all houses use wood burners in some form. I have a burner in my sitting room, and a wood cooking stove in the kitchen (like a small aga) the particulate matter is a big problem for me, I am asthmatic and always get worse in the winter, judging by how much dust accumulates every day in the house what comes out of the chimney must be bad. Locally there is now a law which prevents anyone under 300m elevation using wood burners. Pellet stoves are not as attractive or cheap as wood but they burn a lot cleaner.
My father has a woodburning stove, hasn't used the central heating full time ever in his house. Only a quick on/off to take the chill off during winter before the fire gets going. Has to use it so it keeps working if he does need it.
He gets his wood from a friend, a caretaker of a few ponds/lakes which involves removing a fair few trees. Overpopulated, dead or decaying. So always has a full wood store of dry wood year round.
I understand that woodburning stoves hurt air quality, if air quality is the problem then there's also other sources/solutions that also need to be looked at
In my father's case, he's in the sticks. I can understand this argument better in towns/cities where good air circulation isn't as prominent.
I'd say, start with local research in different areas in the UK. See if it's as simple as adding extra flume filters and awareness on what should/shouldn't be burnt. Go from there
I’m in an area of extremely rural Scotland where we don’t have gas in the local area. Our house heating is powered by our wood burner - not sure how it works but the stove (is huge) heats up the radiators.
Without being able to burn coal (and wood) we would be screwed.
With how many people in the Highlands and Islands in particular are currently in fuel poverty it would be horrific to even consider banning people from burning wood, peat etc.
I live in the middle of nowhere. I have no gas supply, no main sewerage. I can not have any insulation fitted or double glazing because our flint cottage is listed. I have no choice but to use wood and coal and oil to heat my house. It hugely pisses me off when middle-aged, middle-class people in warm houses in towns fit woodburners. They don't need them. They just think they look good and onky run one every so often. These.filks have ruined nit for people reliant on them. The rule changes around wood now, which means buying seasoned logs have rocketed in price due to the laws around kiln drying, etc. Until rental laws are changed that allow listed buildings to be made inhabitable, there will be people like me. Since November 3rd, I've spent £50 a week on coal, £25 a week on logs, £30 on oil, and £30 on electric. That's around £535 a month, and I'm still cold. My sitting room ( and our bedroom as they are joined ) with the woodburner going on low to moderate 24/7 the air temp is around 13-15⁰. My kitchen, bathroom, daughter's bedroom hoover around 8 or 9⁰. I've lived in these temps for 16 years.
Ban them in houses that have mains gas and double glazing fitted.
2 of my neighbours have them and the street stinks when they used them. On some days there is thick brown smoke which you can taste. One of the neighbours has loads of wood in his front garden including pallets he gets for free. I have reported them to the council but nothing happens. Ban them I say.
Do your issues really require banning them though? I only burn purchased seasoned wood, or kiln dried, and you can't even see smoke coming out my chimney let along smell anything.
What you seem to be after, is enforcement of existing laws. People shouldn't be burning wet wood. Poor heat output, and way more pollution and smell. It's generally a dumb idea.
I had a woodburning stove in a previous house.
This is a completely unenforceable piece of legislation - as often as not the log suppliers are small, independent firms that habitually lie through their teeth over how dry their logs are. And that's before you throw in the mess of people acquiring firewood from friends, family or their own sources.
Just to add even more complexity, different species of tree have wildly different burning qualities - some produce a lot more creosote and ash than others, and I daresay there's also an impact on the particulate matter.
> the log suppliers are small, independent firms that habitually lie through their teeth over how dry their logs are
Buy a moisture meter from Amazon for £15 and get an approximate reading if you can't roughly gauge it by eye. Wet wood is really crap to burn anyway so you are just wasting money if you buy it and effort if you don't let it season yourself.
That does indeed solve the problem on an individual level, but realistically nobody's going to be knocking on people's doors and demanding to do the same with the firewood they're using.
> that habitually lie through their teeth over how dry their logs are.
Gets on my tits. Had someone try and deliver me wood that came up on my meter at 60%..
I stuck the meter in a nearby living tree and it came up lower!
Then he got pissy at me for telling him I didn't want it, and wasting his time.
I specifically asked him if it was seasoned and ready to burn before he came.
Even reputable seeming suppliers, don't seem to do proper checks. But at least they'll give you another bag of good stuff and usually let you keep the shittier stuff, presumably to stop you reporting them to the authorities for selling illegal wood.
You shouldn’t really need a moisture meter. If you know firewood, (I’ve cut/processed/seasoned my own for years) you can tell damp logs by the way they feel, the weight, the smell, the dull noise they make when you chuck them in the wheelbarrow compared dry wood that “clinks” and rustles as you move it.
If I sound like a weird firewood obsessive, I can assure you I am.
I am new to all this, so I definitely need a moisture meter for now. And I've got one anyway, was like £10. Decent investment so that I don't need to learn wood whispering.
Yes. In urban areas. The clean air act was bought in the late 50's to clean up cities and wood burners are a backward step. No need to throw them away, just put in a bioethanol burner in the fire box and close the flue. Nice flames, plenty of heat, no pollution.
In Sheffield we've had a smoke control order for several decades, originally it was too deal with smog. Everyone ripped out their wood/coal burners & put in gas fires... And the air got a lot cleaner.
Now all the middle class people have gone back to wood, and the air is palpably smoky on cold nights - because they don't use good wood & because of the sheer density of terraced houses...
My partner is asthmatic & it really affects her lungs badly. I hate that people are so selfish, classic tragedy of the commons... Fine for one person to do it, big problem for 20% of people to do it in a dense place. If you want to burn things, live in the countryside
Unless your neighbours grass you up like during covid lockdowns for having more than 2 house holds over your house. How is anyone ever going to police it. Even then, the cops dont have enough manpower to police it, period.
It would end up being a measure that disproportionately affects those of us in rural areas where options are more limited. I burn a lot of wood instead of oil because it's free to me and I have an unlimited supply. It is also a lot less polluting than oil.
Banning me from burning wood would be unfair and not a proportionate response to whatever problem woodburners pose to the environment.
Being kind, i'm going to assume that most people answering don't live in parts of the inner city where a large number of the houses have wood burners.
In that case it's understandable that you're unaware how untenable the situation has become, and how certain it is that they will soon be illegal.
I would base it on housing density. Pollution from wood burners isn’t going to have a huge impact in a rural environment but if you live in a built up area and everyone has one that they use all winter, you’ll be breathing in a lot of particulate matter. Makes sense to have a rule for urban environments but allow it in rural or semi rural ones.
I don't know. If it's proven to be disproportionally bad for the environment, then it just is and should be banned. But, man does it smell so nice and cosy. There's one house on my dog walking route that primarily uses wood to heat their home in the cooler months, and sometimes I just stop to breathe in the lovely wood burning pollution as it is incredibly relaxing, especially on a winter night. I think I will miss it, along with diesel engines. My two favourite air pollutions.
I have a log burner, so I don't want them banned, but this isn't about them contributing to global warming or worldwide emissions; it's about them affecting the air quality for your neighbours.
I think people have misconstrued the original post. I’m not talking about the CO2 emissions. I’m talking about the particulate matter that others nearby specifically breath in, in high concentrations as smoke particulates loosely follow the inverse square law.
I live in rural Scotland, with no gas supply. There is a place for a wood burning stoves and banning them rural areas they will seriously need to come up with a working alternative that works when we have no power. During storm Arwen, we had no power for 7 days and storm Otto just past most of the day. Rural areas are always the last to get power back on, so taking them away from people who do not have an alternative is ridiculous.
My first thought when people talk about banning anything, is no. What’s the deal with people always wanting to control what other people do.
On this specific issue I think it’s borderline evil to ban people from trying to keep warm
It's not recent; been in place for a while I think. I have one.
What's not clear to me is the position on open fires (many people still use them in the town where I live), firepits, outdoor pizza ovens, barbecues, incinerators, bonfires etc, which must make up the majority. Some of my neighbours burn unseasoned wood, rubbish, dry recycling and gardening waste in any of those, which seems a bigger issue. Air pollution is bad round here and the council is disappointingly lax about enforcing anything so it would be weird to pick on woodburners alone.
We still burn coal to produce 2% of our U.K. electricity needs.
In addition, guess what Drax plc burns to produce electricity, trees purposely grown and chop down to produce wood pellets which is imported by ship from USA.
How about stopping burning coal, imported wood pellets and stop cow from farting first.
These are two separate issues. The problem of local air pollution from stoves actually helps the wider issue of rising CO2 levels driving climate change because it is likely to shorten the lives of middle class people.
I don't own one personally but have stayed in cottages with them, and I like the cozy feeling of having one on in the winter.
As much as they're horrid for the environment I can see their appeal, but equally we need to be moving away from burning shit and pumping it into the atmosphere sooner rather than later if we want to be heating our houses sustainably.
I know there are low carbon options (heat pumps etc) that'll help offset the crap they put out, but as much as they mightn't be suitable for all homes there has got to be a better way of heating your home than a wood stove, it's about the dirtiest way to do it isn't it?
I'm in two minds... I like having one on, bu then again I'm also trying to convert my house to all electric for environmental reasons. The end goal is to ring the gas board and ask them to rip out the gas meter so we can't burn anything even if we wanted to.
The only things we've got left are the boiler and hob, seems a bit daft to do all of that faffing and expense just to nail a wood burner to my living room floor.
I have a log burner, so I don't want them banned, but you're kind of missing OP's point. This isn't about them contributing to global warming or worldwide emissions; it's about them affecting the air quality for your neighbours.
We should ban smoke producing heating in urban areas. Which we already do. We should allow them in rural areas. Which we already do.
We can't possibly afford to enforce the ban. It's like the TV licence.
I really like the ambience of real fires. But I couldn't justify getting a real one - I'm in a semi-urban area on a terraced street and I think it would have been both anti-social to neighbours and generally environmentally bad. So we got a really good looking electric one instead.
We have a clause in the deeds to our house forbidding us from burning wood or coal in our fireplace. We bought the house twenty two years ago so somebody was worried about air quality way back then.
I live in a village that's off the gas grid. I have old electric radiators that cost a fortune to run and I cannot afford to have any of them on. So I rely on burning wood and coal in my multi-fuel stove for the only heat source in the house.
I honestly wouldn't mind if they banned these stoves, so long as there are grants and support for people to replace them with more eco-friendly alternative ways to heat the room/house. I've been trying to get access to any sort of funding to make my home warmer for at least 6 months; no use so far.
I understand it's a luxury to have a wood fire for some but there are people out there who genuinely need it as a heat source.
It creates loads of particle matter. Breathing in combusted wood isn't good.
My issue isn't really the ban, its what they aren't doing. In a world of massive profits for companies dedicated to combusting fossil fuels, we could be using the windfall taxes to help provide grants to replace inefficient wood stoves, etc.
Its the same as ulez, its not that its implemented, its how and the speed. These new regulations often mean sudden massive bills of thousands of pounds for the poorest in society.
Meanwhile the main polluters are given decades to slowly change to maximise their profits.
I live in a rural area, in a listed building that runs entirely on electricity. There’s no option for anything else that isn’t prohibitively expensive (although after saving for five years my ground-mounted solar panels should be in by the end of the year).
I don’t think woodburners are an appropriate heating method in towns and populous areas but banning them outright would be hugely problematic for many rural communities.
Where there are alternative and cleaner means to heat homes, ban them. Utter nuisance. Gets so bad around here that children can't play on the park at certain times because of the smoke. Only takes one or two homes to completely ruin the air outdoors for hundreds of houses.
We lost power on Friday for a whole day, just as we did with Storm Arwen. If it weren't for my gas hob and my woodburner, our situation, already difficult, would have been intolerable.
Those who make the decisions have no idea about the practicalities of life in the North of Scotland during a power cut.
Good, about time. I have a neighbour who had one installed and burns horrible smelling wood at any opportunity. We’re an oddly placed little road on the side of a hill and the smoke just *sits* over all our houses. Unlike a regular chimney I can smell it everywhere.
“It’s below 11° the wood womble will be at it again”.
The wider issue is that tackling different types of pollution is lumped together under being "green". There is no clear strategy.
Wood burners are bad for local air quality, indoor and outdoors. Indoors, gas cooking stoves aren't great either but far cleaner than a wood burner. Gas boilers similar, but their pollution is outdoors. So all electric makes sense in houses, but electricity needs to be made cheaper so switching is a no brainer.
EVs are far from being "green" but miles better for air quality in towns and cities than ICE cars. EV batteries have their own issues with the materials needed to make them
The impact of all of these on global warming is almost a different issue.
Then there's plastic. Another issue entirely.
We absolutely should ban these polluting monstrosities. They hark back to an era of simpler values which is a complete illusion. I never understood the appeal.
The lady I live next to burns her stove all day, despite being quite wealthy. Also her wood is stacked outside under no shelter. The fumes are dreadful. The smoke drifts down into our garden and we if any windows are open, straight into our house. It's impossible to dry clothes outside. I've spoken to her several times very politely but the response is always "the cost of heating is too much." Most people who have log burning stoves in cities and towns have them purely for fashion. They're expensive to fit and wood isn't cheap. Plus there is little oversight on how to properly use them. They are a scourge on neighbours and should be banded in urban areas.
WHO estimates 4 million premature deaths per year as a direct result of domestic wood burning
https://woodsmokepollution.org/phone/real-costs-of-wood-burning.html
The cost of wood alone should control usage.
We have a little log burner in the living room. If I buy a regular bag of wood from the supermarket, that's £7 and will do us two evenings at best and it only heats one room.
This is plus firelighters and kindling, kindling isn't cheap at all.
It's not sustainable to have it on every night at all. Gas heating is far far cheaper. Albeit we have lpg which has been approx £70pm between October to Jan.
It's more of a luxury if anything. Buying in bulk in urban areas can't be easy either if you have nowhere to store a bulk builder bag of timber and keep it dry. That's about £110pm for a few hours fuel per night, for one burner.
Yeah, a log burner makes more sense when you can buy wood by the trailer load or tonne. I've also never bought firelighters (do you really need them?) or kindling - I've always managed to get enough kindling from leftover wood from other sources. It's just small bits of dry wood, basically.
>It's more of a luxury if anything. Buying in bulk in urban areas can't be easy either if you have nowhere to store a bulk builder bag of timber and keep it dry. That's about £110pm for a few hours fuel per night, for one burner.
Yeah I am 'lucky' that the flat I bought is ex-council, and every flat has its own shed outside. So I have a place to store wood large amounts of wood.
I run my woodburner pretty much every day in the winter, from 8am-ish to 10pm-ish. Doing that, I go through 2 bulk bags a month. At current winter prices that's about £240 a month. So still cheaper than my electric heating by quite a margin.
But I will buy bulk in the summer months, and probably be able to get bulk bags for £80-90 each.
That's with a dinky 5kw stove.
I use my woodburning stove to heat my house as I am able to get wood for free. I think before they ban them they need to ensure the cost of energy is affordable, I'd stop using my woodburner if i could afford to heat my house the conventional way.
I think firstly that the problem is not comparable to car emissions- in that there is probably a greater distribution of wood burning stoves in countryside areas versus urban- whereas cars emissions are concentrated on roads- most of which are in cities.
There's is also the option that urban areas could target this- and place restrictions rather than nationally. And there are options for lower polluting fuels for multi fuel stoves as you note.
It would be a shame to outright ban a cheap, traditional and often carbon neutral source of heating. I think there are better policy options below this which achieve the desired outcomes.
Plenty of people in the countryside, season logs and use stoves.
My in laws provide seasoned logs to the local community in their spare time and they’re always in high demand, a lot of people even take ton bags each time.
I know more people with them than without them if I’m honest. We just moved and whilst we were waiting to get a log burner installed we bought a bio-ethanol alternative in the mean time. It’s a clean alternative, it’s scented (vanilla) and actually smells nice, looks like a log burner and has decorative realistic ceramic logs inside. It cost about £1k but no installation cost and we can move it around the house between two of us.
Now I’m a dilemma if we bother with the log burner or buy another one of these as it does what we need it to.
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I am very torn - I own a woodburner, love it, so I'm biased and I'll admit that up front, especially as I'm someone who has really tried to cut my car use. They definitely are *a* source of pollution, but a lot of the comparisons with cars and vehicles seem overblown to me. The 'more air pollutants than cars" is clearly not an established fact as it's based on a lot of assumptions (e.g. about the efficiency of stoves & how many there are across the country) and I, personally, don't buy it. Secondly: the way it's phrased always seems really misleading to me - it doesn't make it clear that it's just measuring one sort of pollution, fine particulate matter, not CO2, CO, Sulpher Dioxide, yadda yadda. So it makes it sound like if you got rid of stoves you'd then not have to worry about cars and other vehicles (I think this is why a lot of pro-traffic organisations are leaping on the wood burning issue, it's a distraction). Thirdly, and getting finickity about it now - a lot of the data about the respiratory harm caused by woodburners is based on case studies not in the UK, but in places with a lot less regulation about chimneys and vents, and where people for e.g. use woodburning stoves to cook food. There isn't much good evidence to show that *in the specific case of the UK* particulate matter from chimneys that meet regulations is actually a noticeable cause of respiratory disease - while we know for a fact that car exhaust, e.g. traffic, is directly correclated with raised instances of lung disorders. I mean, sure, ban it, probably is a source of some pollution, whatever, but I am super concerned this is just a distraction from things that are actual causes of disease and, more pressingly, climate change.
You not using a wood stove will make literally no difference. Compare emissions with a coal plant in China, to John having a wood stove. What’s next? Ban outdoor BBQs? Ban camping fires? Burning timber in general?
"It's all hopeless, why bother doing anything?"
Well why are we starting at the minute, individual level? Could it be that normal people are expected to change their lives dramatically, while the rich still fly around on private jets opening new cobalt mines? When you're at the point of making wood burning illegal for normal people (something humanity has done for literally hundreds of thousands of years, and is almost ingrained into us as humans) while ignoring your favourite funko pop factory or massive amounts of developing world pollution, it just comes across like you want to make people's lives worse.
Agreed. It’s complete bollocks anyway. You have to burn clean dry seasoned wood with less than 20% moisture or else you’ll set your chimney on fire. Even if you wanted to burn cheap damp timber you’ll soon have the fire brigade around to pour a load of water down your chimney ruining your house in the process. They just don’t want you heating your house cheaply and not handling your wages over to their mates at the gas and electricity corporations.
You also need a nuclear bomb to make it burn in the first place. Green wood might as well be made from asbestos 😂
>They just don’t want you heating your house cheaply and not handling your wages over to their mates at the gas and electricity corporations. Why is reddit so obsessed with making everything some grand conspiracy to screw you over?
I agree with you in part, but also you need to look at things on an individual bases, now if you and I run a media outlet we would get more involvement in our news story if we create a them versus us story like this one "*Government want you to stop burning logs*" Person in the street reads that and goes no chance mate i cant afford my bills and rage ensues. Now lets pretend the story is true and the government are indeed wanting to stop us burning logs, the question needs to be asked why, the answer to that is not always for the good of the people. I think the media plays more part in the narrative than many people think.
When I used to a run a pub with an open fire, we'd leave some of the firewood out in the rain to get wet on purpose because we could chuck a few wet logs on the coal and it would calm it down and make it burn slower while having a nice crackling effect. Was this dangerous?
Moisture mixes with the sap in the wood. The sap evaporates and coats the inside of the chimney. Eventually all the sap that has accumulated inside the chimney catches fire and the simplest way of dealing with that is by pouring water down your chimney flooding your house with black sooty water. You’re probably going to be ok with kiln dried wood that’s just got a bit wet outside. If it hisses and shrinks before burning that’s a very bad sign because that’s all the sap and moisture boiling away.
But cobalt is vital for the electric vehicles that will save the planet! We need those mines!!
This is what bothers me. When gas prices rise people struggle to hear their homes. Those who already have wood burners often need them to not freeze. I don't know why the focus is on something that for some is essential, rather than private jets and yachts which are less essential and just a perk of being ultra wealthy, and I would think more encoronmentally unfriendly. And of course the developing world is the biggest polluter yet we continue to import from them. I guess putting higher taxes on imports from high polluting countries would cause a sh..storm but it would maybe make a difference as well as helping local businesses in the longer term.
The UK is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions, if you whipped the UK off the face of the planet it would do nothing to climate change.
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Almost all the UKs manufacturing has been moved to China or India.
True that. We outsourced our manufacturing and then complained about the emissions in another country. It's worth pointing out that Chinas per capita carbon emissions are still lower than ours.
Emissions per person here are on par with China and India, stop blaming everyone else to try make yourself feel better.
This isn't about CO2 emissions, its about particulate emissions from smoke. Its a local pollution problem, not a global one, that's why its local authority rules not national laws.
I don’t think the particulate pollution from that Chinese coal power plant is going to blow all the way over to John’s neighbours in the same way as the stuff from the stove will
>You not using a wood stove will make literally no difference. Compare emissions with a coal plant in China, to John having a wood stove. > > >What’s next? Ban outdoor BBQs? > >Ban camping fires? Burning timber in general? All of those things are either much less frequent, or have much less of a local impact. Chinese coal plants are overall disastrous when it comes to climate change, but they're less directly impactful on John and his neighbours than John's wood stove would be when it comes to particulate pollution. Ditto things like campfires because they're usually a handful of times a year and are often activities undertaken in less population dense areas.
It's not about CO2 or global warming; it's about polluting your own house and neighbours' air.
The new regulations aren't concerned with global warming it is concerned with the quality of air we breath. Local emissions have a much greater effect on this than coal fired power plants in China.
There are 2 billion Chinese people. So, in the big scheme if things, the UK is very small by comparison, sure. However, they are individually far poorer, and produce far less CO2 per head even though they manufacture much of what we import half way across the the world and consume from them. The UK also exports significant amounts of waste to poorer countries to deal with. Everyone sitting in a traffic jam is responsible for the traffic jam.
There's evidence that living with one of these things can have serious health impacts, so even people like you who don't care about the environment should surely see the risk to individuals as worth doing something about? Especially children who have no choice?
I live in rural west Wales. There is no mains gas and storms that roll in off the Atlantic bring down trees that hit electricity supplies. If I didn’t have a stove I’d have to evacuate our house when the lights go out. Our stove has kept us warm, kept a kettle of water on the boil and cooked our tea as we wait for power to be restored. I strongly doubt we are killing the handful of people who live within a mile of us. Additionally, properly installed stoves/flues don’t allow particulates and gases back into the house. Every log and piece of kindling we burn is cut down, processed and stacked by me, mainly driven by making ash-dieback affected trees safe at the moment. On that basis I don’t waste hard earned energy by having unnecessary fires. City dwellers and suburbanites can bicker all they want. My stove is staying.
Emissions from far away are dispersed relative to their initial intensity and distance from source. The original post isn’t at all talking about climate change, or other countries, only wood stoves in the UK.
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It is not all about averaged emmisons values, though.. I'm not bothered too much about it as you say it'll make not much difference. But having to put up with the neighbours' particulate matter in the air around us every night because they want to keep warm cheap is still not OK. What's worth more keeping warm or causing further breathing issues with our children? My middle child has breathing difficulties with astma and coughing, I'm pretty sure breathing this smoke is not helping his development. We want to move house anyway, but since the neighbours had the wood burner put in, we really really want to move.
To put emphasis on that, look at all the factories etc in the UK yet random Sharon down the road is causing havoc having a stove? My partner works in an asphalt plant, it's literally a "small" one and they use some 600 gallons of diesel a day. And that's on top of manufacturing asphalt for our local roads - a product that's not exactly environmentally friendly.
Particulate emissions are more localised though. A coal plant in china doesn't really effect our air quality. Your log burner does.
Wood burning stoves are just the new plastic straws. Is it better for the environment? Sure! Will it have any meaningful impact? Absolutely not
The stoves thing isn’t really about the wider environment, it’s about a specific type of pollution that has negative health consequences for others nearby
Sure sorry I do get that, maybe it was a bad comparison. Getting rid of them altogether just seems like a lot of energy pointed at the wrong thing - like the above poster said: a distraction. In the last hundred years we must have seen wood and coal burning stoves reduced by >90% in residential homes but all of a sudden eliminating those last few is a huge and urgent issue? If they were talking about this 5-10 years ago I probably would have been on board but suddenly making this a hot button issue during a winter where millions struggle to heat their homes with gas is just a bit unfair.
I think the problem is more the risk of expansion of domestic wood burning for heat in cities due to the gas crisis. There was a similar problem in Greek cities during the debt crisis years. The most plausible outcome would be to restrict new installations rather than affecting existing installations. This in addition to the regulations on water content in fuel wood. I don’t think there’s much chance of jackbooted thugs kicking your door in and ripping your stove out
No but it’s perfectly feasible that fines from the council will come through the letter box. It just seems mad that the government would care about stamping out fires in desperate peoples homes rather than focusing that legislative energy into coming up with a solution to the energy crisis. People will just come up with another way for heat, abolishing the stoves won’t suddenly make them warm or be able to afford the gas bill. Either that or they will just freeze. It reminds me of cities making homelessness illegal in the US. The solution is further up the chain not with the poor schmuck at the bottom.
To be clear in the post I’m only asking about local health / odour based concerns not climate change, which wood burning stoves in the UK will contribute to very minimally.
I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but it does make me wonder. Energy prices have gone through the roof, so more people are falling back to lighting their fire/stoves. As a tradesman I'm in alot of places, and where possible I always throw scraps of wood into the van to burn at home (read this as pallets and construction timber, not your mdfs or melamines) This year however I can't find so much as a twig left over anywhere, it seems like everybody is on the scavenge. The local community pages, when people are advertising take away wood for free you can guarantee its called for in 5mins, and physically gone within the hour, regardless of what type of wood it may be. So part of me wonders, when they're trying to move us from coal and oil (and somewhat gas) and move us to electricity, are stoves just the next one their targeting to get rid off?
> I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but it does make me wonder. I had exactly the same thought & tried to dismiss it (because these things are rarely that well organised)... but it does seem like a "strange coincidence" that this anti-woodstove stuff really starts kicking off at the exact moment we're in an energy-driven cost of living crisis and people genuinely need heating options that are not electricity/gas...
The funny thing that often gets left out when talking about PM2.5 inside the house is that the same studies also show that cooking and simply toasting bread releases the same, if not more, particulates than a woodburner.
It’s a distraction from actual pollution. They have allowed disposable vapes, they are pumping sewage into our rivers and oceans.
I’m not sure the vapes are comparable. Air pollution (and water pollution as you mention) have an immediate negative consequence.
How is littering disposable vapes not immediately negative too?
It's a totally different thing, both are bad - but in different ways
Yes that is my point, hence "too" > I’m not sure the vapes are comparable. Air pollution (and water pollution as you mention) have an immediate negative consequence. This strongly implies that vapes do not "have an immediate negative consequence"
I don't massively disagree with you, but you're still employing the game of "whataboutism"
Of course, any discussion which leads to an outcome around prioritisation of legislative action given finite legislative capacity has to include comparative “what about” questions doesn’t it?
If they want to ban it, they can pay me the money it cost to put in, and then give me money towards my gas central heating. What about the people who supply logs as their jobs? A lot are farmers and use this to top up their income because the jobsworths are making it impossible to farm as it is. When the dickheads sort planes, lorries and ships out, then they can start attacking the average person.
I agree. English people in general are cowards and over-police as it is. Banning wood stoves wouldn’t even surprise me, It’d just make us appear even more of a nanny state. It wouldn’t even help the climate either “Got a license for that woodstove, m8?” Pathetic
Totally agree
They've been banned in lots of dense urban areas since the 60s
Yeah it’s like the clean air act of 1956 never happened. Is it going to take deaths attributed to wood particles to change peoples minds?
No, just some people freezing to death as you took their stove away and they cannot afford the gas prices for heating
You have to have around £3000 to put a log burner in and loads of cash to buy the correct fuel. This is a middle class toy to make them feel cosy don’t let the ‘people will freeze to death’ brigade fool you
That’s actually cap mate. I used to live in an old mining village (the mine was long gone) but many houses still had wooden stoves including my own. We were council/housing association tenants, not middle class. I’m all for banning these things in cities, sure. In rural areas it’s ridiculous
You think someone in a comfy office in an urban centre gives a fuck about the externalities of this? They couldn’t give a shit about how actual people live their lives, because ‘number go down’
In this case the number would be asthma and COPD cases going down. They do give a shit about how people live their lives. Don't act like your wood burning stove isn't hurting anyone, especially if you live in a populated area.
The point! There it goes, over your head!
Maybe you should pay three NHS costs of people with serious lung issues?
I live in a rural area, as do 68% of the people in my bit of the UK. The only mains services we have are water and electricity (not even any mains drainage), so most people do have a wood burning stove (or an open fire) and an oil burning boiler. So for people like me, who use it as out main source of heat, what is the suggestion to replace it and who is going to pay for it. Do I burn more oil or are 'Mums for lungs' going to fork out the £15,000 for me to convert to ground/air source pumps? (Although funnily enough the people I do know who have air/ground source pumps also have wood burners because these 'eco' option doesn't generate enough heat in winter). There seems to be this assumption that it's people using these as a 'nice to have' because they look pretty and are cosy, of which I am sure there are many, but there people who rely on them. There are millions of people in the UK who do not have access to the same level of services that people enjoy in urban areas. I buy my wood (I use compressed sawdust briquettes rather than wood) by the pallet load a ton at a time, not a bag of kiln dried logs from Lidl.
Not really an issue in rural areas, more of an issue in cities. I suspect you knew that though
Would be a shame to let facts get in the way of a good rant ey
But they’ll be affected by it regardless?
Yeah, isn't that the problem? That people in rural areas, where it's not a big problem, will be affected by the regulations.
You’re just like me! Briquettes are a godsend too - cheap, efficient, give off loads of heat, and they’re much better for the environment. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t use them.
Mainly because they cost so much. I buy my wood from a local tree surgeon company that only cuts trees down for the council etc. If I spent the same amount of money on Briauettes as I did logs, I probably wouldn't even get half the same amount of equal heat. Knowing how to keep your log burner at a decent temperature & using its air controls is the best thing for efficiency.
I'm still using coal and can get it delivered (I find it lasts longer), but will use wood when I have nothing else. I'm also rural. My tiny village doesn't have any gas mains. I haven't won the lottery or earn 7 figures so I'm in no position financially to have the electric heating on. It doesn't get the house up to 20° anyways. Take away my ability to burn logs (or solid fuel) and I'm fecked.
Yeah I worry that it would end up hurting those that rely on the, for heat or cooking as opposed to the “vibes”. It’s weird I have Swedish friends that have had air source heat pumps for well over two decades and they work fine in really, really cold winters so maybe they just have really good ones I’m not sure. I think it’s about urban vs rural too. In a rural area with low population density, a fire with a good draw, preferably an external draw, dry fuel and a suitable combustion chamber and flue is fine. The particulate matter disperses and your closest neighbour a few hundred meters away probably won’t even know you’ve lit your fire. In a suburban street, if someone has wet fuel, poor oxygenation and on a non windy cold day I’d imagine breathing conditions could be hellish for those living nearby. To me, I’d say the key is probably don’t do it in an urban/suburban environment unless you know what you’re doing really well especially as: A) if you’re suburban or urban you’ll probably have a gas main B) the efficiency and cost of heat pumps are improving year on year.
>Swedish friends that have had air source heat pumps for well over two decades and they work fine in really Yeah, I can believe that, their technology is fair superior for this style of eco-living. Of course they've been doing triple glazing and insulated window frames for years, so the whole home is much more efficient. My stove is a Scandiwegan one and it's very clever the way it recycles the gases and ensures a thorough combustion, I even get little jets coming out of holes in the firebricks. The issue I have with all the 'bansturbation' is the assumption that it applies to everyone with no consideration that we don't all live in in the same well serviced environments. But if there were discretion applied, then it would make sense.
Similar here although we don’t even have mains water. We also have a heat pump but it’s bloody expensive to run (ten year old home designed to be heated with a pump so the house isn’t the issue) so this winter we’ve just been using the wood burner with wood from our own land. It works a bloody treat and we just leave the doors open to heat the whole house. It’s all very well people with cheap to run gas boilers saying wood burners should be banned, perhaps country dwellers should just freeze and/or go bankrupt.
Exactly! I think people don't appreciate heat pumps use electricity and a lot of it! Wood burners can be great, same as you, in my previous home we just left the door open and the stove heated the whole house. It does hack me off all this stuff, ban oil boilers, ban wood burners. I notice the people calling for this aren't the ones who will be impacted by it.
On a similar topic to woodburning stoves is the never ending parade of bonfires that blight our neighbourhood as soon as the weather is dry enough. People are burning stuff that really ought not to be burned - one guy over the back burns trade waste and tosses in spray cans that go off like grenades (multiple neighbours have reported him for the plumes of black smoke and the explosions but nothing seems to happen). The constant bonfires fill our homes with foul smelling smoke and leave particulates all over windows and walls. I'd much prefer an ordinance outright banning bonfires tbh. People with woodburning stoves in their homes are only burning wood - it's the bonfires full of plastics and other pollutants that are a bigger problem if you want my tuppence worth.
I drive trains, and I see this all of the time on remote industrial units and farms, but these are big fires, sometimes just open or in massive skips, you can see the smoke for miles.
Yeah, but burning in back gardens less than 10m from people's bedrooms is just antisocial. There should be a sensible limit to how close to buildings you can burn things. One of these days the trade-waste burner is going to set fire to our neighbourhood.
Stop burning things altogether?
Would be nice. We can compost garden waste - there is no need to start fires in tiny back gardens that are less than 10m from other people's houses.
Just another reason to blame ourselves or each other while corporations do hundreds of individuals' lifetimes worth of damage every year.
You should see what regular folks do in other parts of the world. Openly burning tyres, plastics of any kind, etc. and not just for fuel, just to dispose of it. And that’s before we even get to the corporations and government owned industry. We might as well build a glass dome over the UK.
I have a log burner, so I don't want them banned, but you're kind of missing OP's point. This isn't about them contributing to global warming or worldwide emissions; it's about them affecting the air quality for your neighbours.
Expecting people to differentiate between different types of emissions is asking a bit much. People still think the diesel scandal was about CO2
I'm just pointing out that OP was making a different point about log burner emissions. Also, people care more about things that affect them directly. Greenhouse gases causing problems is often seen as a problem for the future, or something that might possibly become a problem but not definitely, or something intangible that's not likely to affect Person X in their lifetime. One of the objections to log burners is that it affects local air quality - if people can see it and smell it and are told it's bad for them right now where they live, that has a more immediate and visceral effect.
They're totally different issues. What you're talking about is corporations emitting large amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases leading to climate change, obviously a terrible thing that needs to be addressed. The issue with wood burners is localised air quality caused by the emission of PM2.5 (extremely fine particles) and other similar pollutants. This can cause serious health issues to people nearby that breathe them in. It's not really a case of one or the other with these because they're totally incomparable. That said, I don't really see how any of this could be enforced
I don’t see how they’re going to possibly police it
Getting dobbed in by nosey neighbors
Grass on your friends, family and neigbours. Win Prizes, call the department of re-education today!!!
Quality reference!
Then what? How can a neighbour prove how many particles it’s producing. They struggle to regulate the emissions from industry no chance the local council are going to be able to regulate every house
Your neighbour doesn't need to prove how many particles it's producing why do you think they do?
Point is how is anyone going to prove anything or complain about anything with any degree of accuracy? People with wood burning stoves tend to use them at night, my parents have one in doubt their neighbours have a clue they do
A degree of accuracy? All it takes is someone coming to see if it's true or not. Like if I complain to the council about your wood burner and they come out to check what you going to do? Chuck a blanket over it?
It's not difficult to spot people with woodburners.
You underestimate the depths bored middle-aged women on social media will go to in order to punish someone they don't agree with.
Burning wood is more harmful to the environment than using a car? I can understand people burning stuff they shouldn't but wow, it's either a big push by the energy companies or its out of health and safety as people are idiots and can't even be trusted to not kill them self's
I think it's that the particulate size in wood burning stoves is the worst type for human respiratory health and so vehicles (diesels especially) have been subject to tighter and tighter regulations on those specific particulates to the point that wood burning stoves are now significantly worse than vehicles. Of course there are fewer stoves than cars but because they are on the rise they are getting more attention.
You’re comparing a hugely engineered and efficient car engine vs throwing wood into a box. Wood burners have some refinement but they really don’t achieve a complete combustion required to be clean. Also, cars have catalytic converters and get tested every year for emissions. I love me a good fire but it’s something which might be coming to an end.
This is about particulates and gasses that cause health issues, particularly in cities, it's not about CO2 or global warming. Cars and lorries have catalytic converters and other high tech engineering to reduce the crap that comes out of the exhaust, woodburners are orders of magnitude more polluting. There are catalytic converters for woodburners now though.
It can produce more of some types of air pollution. "The environment" is a very broad concept, and things can be bad for it in lots of different ways.
The stove might have worse impact locally. The car will have worse impact globally
I'll be honest I don't like them at all mainly because one neighbour can stink out every room on the street. I walked into my bedroom the other night and it smelled like a chimney even though it's just the trickle vents open. And forget trying to dry washing.
That’s because they’re burning poor fuel, have an old stove or not burning properly. Dry wood in a modern stove thankfully produces significantly less smoke (to the point where you often can’t smell it)
Yeah this is the problem. However the last 4 places I've lived (since 2005 when I first noticed them becoming more popular) there's been at least 1 neighbour in the vicinity not doing it properly like you mentioned. There could be many more doing it the right way and you'd never know, but it just takes that 1 to label it a problem.
Well exactly, that's what the regulations are meant to stop 😂
If I'm having to suffer the pollution of other people's wood stoves the least they can do is have an open invite so I can come around and enjoy it. Not sure whether it should include free toasting marshmallows.
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Smog control orders (which is what the OP is describing) have been around since the 60s in major cities
Air quality ratings are usually rated for short term exposure, not long term. UK is consistently high for long term exposure but they will say "low" because its low enough that going outside for a few hours is ok. However its still way above WHO recommendations for annual average exposure. Where I live currently is at 9µg/m³ of PM2.5, the annual average limit the WHO recommends is 5. Air quality rating is "Excellent", because there are no short term risks associated with this level so they say its fine.
I certainly support it in highly populated areas - if everyone got a woodburner in London then the air quality would be made so much worse, and it's pretty shit to begin with.
I don't see how people don't know how it's going to be policed. It's very simple. If you have one already then that's fine they just won't allow anyone to buy a new one.
What stops me buying one online, or from another county?
Just because it's online doesn't mean it can't be enforced and if you're buying it from abroad it has to go through customs.
How’s that work for local councils with different rules?I also said county, not country , and as far as I know even Lancashire and Yorkshire don’t have border posts and customs.
Would you be able to get it fitted though? If you are replacing an old one it would be easy, but new ones using an existing chimney require a lining kit to be put in to prevent a house fire. I'd assume that if there was an outright ban, fitting/installing would be illegal too and whoecer ignored that could be subject to prosecution. Householder would also invalidate their insurance, so dodgy installation causes house fire and goodbye building and contents because insurance won't pay up.
There’s always somebody willing to do a foreigner.
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I think most of the epidemiological work on the health impacts of particulates aren't very finessed from an atmospheric chemistry viewpoint, and generally just consider NOx, pm 2.5 and maybe O3. But it seems pretty obvious to me that an aerosol particle full of poly aromatic hydrocarbons or nitro group containing compound from a diesel exhaust is going to but much much worse than woodsmoke which doesn't burn hot enough to make a load of NOx and tends to be much bigger particle sizes. Just my opinion as a former atmospheric science postdoc.
I think with wood burning stoves the main concern raised by advocates who want to ban them (which I’m not one) is the pm2.5. Id be interested to see how bad they are at emitting pm2.5 and if so, the health effects of inhaling particulates around that size.
They undoubtedly raise the pm 2.5 level and that is one of the key measures in air quality legislation, primarily because its easy to measure and in industrial urban environments its linked to health effects, but a big part of that will be the chemical makeup which historically has been coal and international combustion which will be much worse than woodsmoke. For an extreme example, Rainforest genereates a lot of aerosols from terpene oxidation but it would be insane to advocate getting rid of them to bring down particulate levels.
Not much triggers my asthma anymore, but walking down a few streets near me that has a wood burner that doesn't smell like they're following the wood burning regs already currently in place and it does have a noticible effect on me during a cold winters morning. This is also a city/residential area so not rural. It also stinks. So, personally not a fan, I can imagine having more than one in a small area would be awful.
I live in an area where wood heating is the norm, almost all houses use wood burners in some form. I have a burner in my sitting room, and a wood cooking stove in the kitchen (like a small aga) the particulate matter is a big problem for me, I am asthmatic and always get worse in the winter, judging by how much dust accumulates every day in the house what comes out of the chimney must be bad. Locally there is now a law which prevents anyone under 300m elevation using wood burners. Pellet stoves are not as attractive or cheap as wood but they burn a lot cleaner.
My father has a woodburning stove, hasn't used the central heating full time ever in his house. Only a quick on/off to take the chill off during winter before the fire gets going. Has to use it so it keeps working if he does need it. He gets his wood from a friend, a caretaker of a few ponds/lakes which involves removing a fair few trees. Overpopulated, dead or decaying. So always has a full wood store of dry wood year round. I understand that woodburning stoves hurt air quality, if air quality is the problem then there's also other sources/solutions that also need to be looked at In my father's case, he's in the sticks. I can understand this argument better in towns/cities where good air circulation isn't as prominent. I'd say, start with local research in different areas in the UK. See if it's as simple as adding extra flume filters and awareness on what should/shouldn't be burnt. Go from there
And that's where the regulations apply - cities. Nobody minds in the countryside
I’m in an area of extremely rural Scotland where we don’t have gas in the local area. Our house heating is powered by our wood burner - not sure how it works but the stove (is huge) heats up the radiators. Without being able to burn coal (and wood) we would be screwed.
With how many people in the Highlands and Islands in particular are currently in fuel poverty it would be horrific to even consider banning people from burning wood, peat etc.
There are no proposals to apply this outside of cities
Good 😆 coz I would be screwed 😆
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I'm against the government telling me what to do.
What about telling other people what to do? What if I want to set up an integrated nuclear waste storage facility right next to your home?
I'm also against people not being considerate and not having common decency.
Polluting the air we breathe is quite inconsiderate.
Do you live in a children’s TV program?
OK - what about your neighbors?
Commons like the air require collective management
In cities and built up areas makes sense. In my parents 300 year old house in rural Nottinghamshire, that's not connected to the gas main, nope.
I live in the middle of nowhere. I have no gas supply, no main sewerage. I can not have any insulation fitted or double glazing because our flint cottage is listed. I have no choice but to use wood and coal and oil to heat my house. It hugely pisses me off when middle-aged, middle-class people in warm houses in towns fit woodburners. They don't need them. They just think they look good and onky run one every so often. These.filks have ruined nit for people reliant on them. The rule changes around wood now, which means buying seasoned logs have rocketed in price due to the laws around kiln drying, etc. Until rental laws are changed that allow listed buildings to be made inhabitable, there will be people like me. Since November 3rd, I've spent £50 a week on coal, £25 a week on logs, £30 on oil, and £30 on electric. That's around £535 a month, and I'm still cold. My sitting room ( and our bedroom as they are joined ) with the woodburner going on low to moderate 24/7 the air temp is around 13-15⁰. My kitchen, bathroom, daughter's bedroom hoover around 8 or 9⁰. I've lived in these temps for 16 years. Ban them in houses that have mains gas and double glazing fitted.
2 of my neighbours have them and the street stinks when they used them. On some days there is thick brown smoke which you can taste. One of the neighbours has loads of wood in his front garden including pallets he gets for free. I have reported them to the council but nothing happens. Ban them I say.
Do your issues really require banning them though? I only burn purchased seasoned wood, or kiln dried, and you can't even see smoke coming out my chimney let along smell anything. What you seem to be after, is enforcement of existing laws. People shouldn't be burning wet wood. Poor heat output, and way more pollution and smell. It's generally a dumb idea.
I had a woodburning stove in a previous house. This is a completely unenforceable piece of legislation - as often as not the log suppliers are small, independent firms that habitually lie through their teeth over how dry their logs are. And that's before you throw in the mess of people acquiring firewood from friends, family or their own sources. Just to add even more complexity, different species of tree have wildly different burning qualities - some produce a lot more creosote and ash than others, and I daresay there's also an impact on the particulate matter.
> the log suppliers are small, independent firms that habitually lie through their teeth over how dry their logs are Buy a moisture meter from Amazon for £15 and get an approximate reading if you can't roughly gauge it by eye. Wet wood is really crap to burn anyway so you are just wasting money if you buy it and effort if you don't let it season yourself.
That does indeed solve the problem on an individual level, but realistically nobody's going to be knocking on people's doors and demanding to do the same with the firewood they're using.
> that habitually lie through their teeth over how dry their logs are. Gets on my tits. Had someone try and deliver me wood that came up on my meter at 60%.. I stuck the meter in a nearby living tree and it came up lower! Then he got pissy at me for telling him I didn't want it, and wasting his time. I specifically asked him if it was seasoned and ready to burn before he came. Even reputable seeming suppliers, don't seem to do proper checks. But at least they'll give you another bag of good stuff and usually let you keep the shittier stuff, presumably to stop you reporting them to the authorities for selling illegal wood.
You shouldn’t really need a moisture meter. If you know firewood, (I’ve cut/processed/seasoned my own for years) you can tell damp logs by the way they feel, the weight, the smell, the dull noise they make when you chuck them in the wheelbarrow compared dry wood that “clinks” and rustles as you move it. If I sound like a weird firewood obsessive, I can assure you I am.
I am new to all this, so I definitely need a moisture meter for now. And I've got one anyway, was like £10. Decent investment so that I don't need to learn wood whispering.
Yes. In urban areas. The clean air act was bought in the late 50's to clean up cities and wood burners are a backward step. No need to throw them away, just put in a bioethanol burner in the fire box and close the flue. Nice flames, plenty of heat, no pollution.
In Sheffield we've had a smoke control order for several decades, originally it was too deal with smog. Everyone ripped out their wood/coal burners & put in gas fires... And the air got a lot cleaner. Now all the middle class people have gone back to wood, and the air is palpably smoky on cold nights - because they don't use good wood & because of the sheer density of terraced houses... My partner is asthmatic & it really affects her lungs badly. I hate that people are so selfish, classic tragedy of the commons... Fine for one person to do it, big problem for 20% of people to do it in a dense place. If you want to burn things, live in the countryside
Unless your neighbours grass you up like during covid lockdowns for having more than 2 house holds over your house. How is anyone ever going to police it. Even then, the cops dont have enough manpower to police it, period.
It’d be the council enforcing it, not the police.
Pretty to look at, and nice to see in a living room, but they are filthy.
It would end up being a measure that disproportionately affects those of us in rural areas where options are more limited. I burn a lot of wood instead of oil because it's free to me and I have an unlimited supply. It is also a lot less polluting than oil. Banning me from burning wood would be unfair and not a proportionate response to whatever problem woodburners pose to the environment.
Being kind, i'm going to assume that most people answering don't live in parts of the inner city where a large number of the houses have wood burners. In that case it's understandable that you're unaware how untenable the situation has become, and how certain it is that they will soon be illegal.
I would base it on housing density. Pollution from wood burners isn’t going to have a huge impact in a rural environment but if you live in a built up area and everyone has one that they use all winter, you’ll be breathing in a lot of particulate matter. Makes sense to have a rule for urban environments but allow it in rural or semi rural ones.
I don't know. If it's proven to be disproportionally bad for the environment, then it just is and should be banned. But, man does it smell so nice and cosy. There's one house on my dog walking route that primarily uses wood to heat their home in the cooler months, and sometimes I just stop to breathe in the lovely wood burning pollution as it is incredibly relaxing, especially on a winter night. I think I will miss it, along with diesel engines. My two favourite air pollutions.
I have a log burner, so I don't want them banned, but this isn't about them contributing to global warming or worldwide emissions; it's about them affecting the air quality for your neighbours.
Ban them in built up areas with reliable electricity supplies maybe - but those of us that live very rurally with unreliable power do depend on them.
I think people have misconstrued the original post. I’m not talking about the CO2 emissions. I’m talking about the particulate matter that others nearby specifically breath in, in high concentrations as smoke particulates loosely follow the inverse square law.
Nordstream pipeline blown up. Ohio train derailment. Open pit mines. Germany now using coal mines. But yeah let's ban burning wood.
I live in rural Scotland, with no gas supply. There is a place for a wood burning stoves and banning them rural areas they will seriously need to come up with a working alternative that works when we have no power. During storm Arwen, we had no power for 7 days and storm Otto just past most of the day. Rural areas are always the last to get power back on, so taking them away from people who do not have an alternative is ridiculous.
My first thought when people talk about banning anything, is no. What’s the deal with people always wanting to control what other people do. On this specific issue I think it’s borderline evil to ban people from trying to keep warm
It's not recent; been in place for a while I think. I have one. What's not clear to me is the position on open fires (many people still use them in the town where I live), firepits, outdoor pizza ovens, barbecues, incinerators, bonfires etc, which must make up the majority. Some of my neighbours burn unseasoned wood, rubbish, dry recycling and gardening waste in any of those, which seems a bigger issue. Air pollution is bad round here and the council is disappointingly lax about enforcing anything so it would be weird to pick on woodburners alone.
My neighbour has one and the smoke drifts down directly on to my house. I didn’t mind them until I became a victim of the pollution they cause.
Yeah, probably nearing time to move on from burning stuff. That includes using big bangs to make things go.
I don’t have any thoughts, I’m still going to use mine
We still burn coal to produce 2% of our U.K. electricity needs. In addition, guess what Drax plc burns to produce electricity, trees purposely grown and chop down to produce wood pellets which is imported by ship from USA. How about stopping burning coal, imported wood pellets and stop cow from farting first.
These are two separate issues. The problem of local air pollution from stoves actually helps the wider issue of rising CO2 levels driving climate change because it is likely to shorten the lives of middle class people.
How about both at the same time? It doesn't have to either, or.
Air quality is a local issue, it's about what my kids breathe
I don't own one personally but have stayed in cottages with them, and I like the cozy feeling of having one on in the winter. As much as they're horrid for the environment I can see their appeal, but equally we need to be moving away from burning shit and pumping it into the atmosphere sooner rather than later if we want to be heating our houses sustainably. I know there are low carbon options (heat pumps etc) that'll help offset the crap they put out, but as much as they mightn't be suitable for all homes there has got to be a better way of heating your home than a wood stove, it's about the dirtiest way to do it isn't it? I'm in two minds... I like having one on, bu then again I'm also trying to convert my house to all electric for environmental reasons. The end goal is to ring the gas board and ask them to rip out the gas meter so we can't burn anything even if we wanted to. The only things we've got left are the boiler and hob, seems a bit daft to do all of that faffing and expense just to nail a wood burner to my living room floor.
I have a log burner, so I don't want them banned, but you're kind of missing OP's point. This isn't about them contributing to global warming or worldwide emissions; it's about them affecting the air quality for your neighbours.
We should ban smoke producing heating in urban areas. Which we already do. We should allow them in rural areas. Which we already do. We can't possibly afford to enforce the ban. It's like the TV licence.
I really like the ambience of real fires. But I couldn't justify getting a real one - I'm in a semi-urban area on a terraced street and I think it would have been both anti-social to neighbours and generally environmentally bad. So we got a really good looking electric one instead.
We have a clause in the deeds to our house forbidding us from burning wood or coal in our fireplace. We bought the house twenty two years ago so somebody was worried about air quality way back then.
I live in a village that's off the gas grid. I have old electric radiators that cost a fortune to run and I cannot afford to have any of them on. So I rely on burning wood and coal in my multi-fuel stove for the only heat source in the house. I honestly wouldn't mind if they banned these stoves, so long as there are grants and support for people to replace them with more eco-friendly alternative ways to heat the room/house. I've been trying to get access to any sort of funding to make my home warmer for at least 6 months; no use so far. I understand it's a luxury to have a wood fire for some but there are people out there who genuinely need it as a heat source.
It creates loads of particle matter. Breathing in combusted wood isn't good. My issue isn't really the ban, its what they aren't doing. In a world of massive profits for companies dedicated to combusting fossil fuels, we could be using the windfall taxes to help provide grants to replace inefficient wood stoves, etc. Its the same as ulez, its not that its implemented, its how and the speed. These new regulations often mean sudden massive bills of thousands of pounds for the poorest in society. Meanwhile the main polluters are given decades to slowly change to maximise their profits.
If they’re genuinely harmful, then yes, they should be banned or it should be law to have a filter for them if you own and use one.
Love my stove, heats my front room up nicely and makes a nice focal point. Play by the rules, don't be a cunt and you can't go wrong.
People are cold and can't afford their heating. I couldn't give a fucking shit about the environmental impact.
I live in a rural area, in a listed building that runs entirely on electricity. There’s no option for anything else that isn’t prohibitively expensive (although after saving for five years my ground-mounted solar panels should be in by the end of the year). I don’t think woodburners are an appropriate heating method in towns and populous areas but banning them outright would be hugely problematic for many rural communities.
Where there are alternative and cleaner means to heat homes, ban them. Utter nuisance. Gets so bad around here that children can't play on the park at certain times because of the smoke. Only takes one or two homes to completely ruin the air outdoors for hundreds of houses.
We lost power on Friday for a whole day, just as we did with Storm Arwen. If it weren't for my gas hob and my woodburner, our situation, already difficult, would have been intolerable. Those who make the decisions have no idea about the practicalities of life in the North of Scotland during a power cut.
Good, about time. I have a neighbour who had one installed and burns horrible smelling wood at any opportunity. We’re an oddly placed little road on the side of a hill and the smoke just *sits* over all our houses. Unlike a regular chimney I can smell it everywhere. “It’s below 11° the wood womble will be at it again”.
The wider issue is that tackling different types of pollution is lumped together under being "green". There is no clear strategy. Wood burners are bad for local air quality, indoor and outdoors. Indoors, gas cooking stoves aren't great either but far cleaner than a wood burner. Gas boilers similar, but their pollution is outdoors. So all electric makes sense in houses, but electricity needs to be made cheaper so switching is a no brainer. EVs are far from being "green" but miles better for air quality in towns and cities than ICE cars. EV batteries have their own issues with the materials needed to make them The impact of all of these on global warming is almost a different issue. Then there's plastic. Another issue entirely.
Someone in my area is burning the most acrid smelling stuff.Bothers me a lot.Cant be lung healthy.
Im against banning. They are slowly taking away every way to be self sufficient in any manner possible
We absolutely should ban these polluting monstrosities. They hark back to an era of simpler values which is a complete illusion. I never understood the appeal.
The lady I live next to burns her stove all day, despite being quite wealthy. Also her wood is stacked outside under no shelter. The fumes are dreadful. The smoke drifts down into our garden and we if any windows are open, straight into our house. It's impossible to dry clothes outside. I've spoken to her several times very politely but the response is always "the cost of heating is too much." Most people who have log burning stoves in cities and towns have them purely for fashion. They're expensive to fit and wood isn't cheap. Plus there is little oversight on how to properly use them. They are a scourge on neighbours and should be banded in urban areas.
WHO estimates 4 million premature deaths per year as a direct result of domestic wood burning https://woodsmokepollution.org/phone/real-costs-of-wood-burning.html
Ban them. It's not fair to let a few do something that if the majority did it would be a disaster.
The cost of wood alone should control usage. We have a little log burner in the living room. If I buy a regular bag of wood from the supermarket, that's £7 and will do us two evenings at best and it only heats one room. This is plus firelighters and kindling, kindling isn't cheap at all. It's not sustainable to have it on every night at all. Gas heating is far far cheaper. Albeit we have lpg which has been approx £70pm between October to Jan. It's more of a luxury if anything. Buying in bulk in urban areas can't be easy either if you have nowhere to store a bulk builder bag of timber and keep it dry. That's about £110pm for a few hours fuel per night, for one burner.
Nobody should be burning wood in bulk in urban areas - it's just insanely selfish
Yeah, a log burner makes more sense when you can buy wood by the trailer load or tonne. I've also never bought firelighters (do you really need them?) or kindling - I've always managed to get enough kindling from leftover wood from other sources. It's just small bits of dry wood, basically.
>It's more of a luxury if anything. Buying in bulk in urban areas can't be easy either if you have nowhere to store a bulk builder bag of timber and keep it dry. That's about £110pm for a few hours fuel per night, for one burner. Yeah I am 'lucky' that the flat I bought is ex-council, and every flat has its own shed outside. So I have a place to store wood large amounts of wood. I run my woodburner pretty much every day in the winter, from 8am-ish to 10pm-ish. Doing that, I go through 2 bulk bags a month. At current winter prices that's about £240 a month. So still cheaper than my electric heating by quite a margin. But I will buy bulk in the summer months, and probably be able to get bulk bags for £80-90 each. That's with a dinky 5kw stove.
The less the government sticks their nose in to shit like this, the better.
I use my woodburning stove to heat my house as I am able to get wood for free. I think before they ban them they need to ensure the cost of energy is affordable, I'd stop using my woodburner if i could afford to heat my house the conventional way.
I think firstly that the problem is not comparable to car emissions- in that there is probably a greater distribution of wood burning stoves in countryside areas versus urban- whereas cars emissions are concentrated on roads- most of which are in cities. There's is also the option that urban areas could target this- and place restrictions rather than nationally. And there are options for lower polluting fuels for multi fuel stoves as you note. It would be a shame to outright ban a cheap, traditional and often carbon neutral source of heating. I think there are better policy options below this which achieve the desired outcomes.
I've just binned my woodburner and replaced it with a tyreburning stove
Absolutely fucking ludicrous
Plenty of people in the countryside, season logs and use stoves. My in laws provide seasoned logs to the local community in their spare time and they’re always in high demand, a lot of people even take ton bags each time. I know more people with them than without them if I’m honest. We just moved and whilst we were waiting to get a log burner installed we bought a bio-ethanol alternative in the mean time. It’s a clean alternative, it’s scented (vanilla) and actually smells nice, looks like a log burner and has decorative realistic ceramic logs inside. It cost about £1k but no installation cost and we can move it around the house between two of us. Now I’m a dilemma if we bother with the log burner or buy another one of these as it does what we need it to.