New laws on woodburners

[richardwale]

Also....my gas boiler, during ALL the cold months, ONLY  heats my water. An hour or so a day.

The rest of the 7 months we burn dry wood

Wonder how many MP's in their lovely houses have a stove, inglenook, open fire, fire pit in the garden, chiminea or whatever they are, charcoal bbq, bonfire to burn the "ruddy waste"....

 

[openspaceman]

1 hour ago, Martin du Preez said:

 No I'm sorry stoves are efficient if used properly.

Yes

1 hour ago, Martin du Preez said:

 

Wood smoke isn't going to kill anyone,

Well components of it have definitely got the potential to cause or aggravate a condition which will shorten a life

1 hour ago, Martin du Preez said:

 

it's been happening for centuries

Yes and so have cancers associated with it, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons arising from poor combustion of coal or biomass (including cigarettes) have been shown to have causal links to lung and scrotal cancer and implicated in ischemic heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

1 hour ago, Martin du Preez said:

 

 They are insignificant compared to other sources of pollution.

Have you a cite for that? Recent publications suggest over 30% of particulates are a result of combustion of wood, what is missing is that they are probably not contributed from modern stoves correctly burning dry wood.

 

[openspaceman]

8 hours ago, Richard 1234 said:

We got an email from school instructing us to switch our engines off no matter how many seconds we waited at school drop off/pick up time!

Which is much as I was expecting would start happening

[Stumpy Grinder]

1 hour ago, carpenter1 said:

i think they should stop burning wood to dry wood in kilns, just season it for a year or two like most of us, that will save, this could hurt good log sellers, seasoning properly 

I think this depends on how it's done to some extent. An estate where I manage the deer produce an awful lot of wood each year from 2,500 acres of woodland. All the crappy stuff and softwood gets chipped to produce about 1000 cubic metres of wood chip. They have a CHP plant in the wood yard that burns about a cube per day and produces 47KVA of electric into the National Grid 24/7. It also produces about 35KVA of heat which is channelled through a perforated floor in a huge store to dry the wood chip which is also sold to other users. So effectively using the bi-product or burning waste wood to produce electricity to dry its own fuel. Surely that is a good thing and an efficient way to use everything produced from the woods?

SG

[Steven P]

I'm reading this and trying to think of the incentive behind the idea. I reckon that its wood burning stoves because few people'in the cities' (in my mind high density housing - flats and so on) would be opening up a fire place and just having an open fire - they will be putting in a stove. So my thought is that wood burning stoves get hit because they are whats installed when the numbers of fireplaces increases 'in the cities'.

 

Dry wood - wet wood..yeah, I would keep my wood supply, and a bucket of 'kiln dried' wood by the fire just in case... and burn my usual wood. 'I'm not obsessed - if electricity was cheaper than logs / coal then thats what I would do (and reclaim my garden from the log piles).

 

And as for armies of wood goblins stripping the forests bare.. probably not going to happen - we need the luxury of space to store wood to burn, and more space to chop and split it - how many flats, apartments or maisonettes in the cities will have that space free?

 

[Bob_z_l]

When you start going down the ban everything road ...things get tricky. Borderline unenforceable.

 

Possibly they could Ban the sale of new non compliant/efficient wood burners and new installations- yes.

 

 

 

But banning ALL woodburners and open fires?

As others have said, there are greater contributors to particulates, but burning wood......?.

 

Or, they could start at B&Q (insert other homewares chain here) and ban all BBQ's and Chimneas.

 

Or, have I missed the point, is it only the particulates in home burn wet firewood?

 

Madness

 

[Stere]

Quote

I can see a few reasons:

 

1) we are burning gas at an alarming rate and it was intended that building regs would deprecate gas connections for new builds by 2016, what the current situation is I don't know.

 

2) Most of us on this forum burn wood because it heats our homes cheaper than other fuels. Granted this is not true for most who buy logs as a luxury item. Since the demise of the pulp mills wood burning has provided an economic outlet for forestry.

 

3) It is possible and practicable to burn wood acceptably cleanly

Good point about gas being unsustainable but wood is also if you think of the fossil fuels used in harvesting transport etc, & the lack of tree planting in UK & large biomass demand means there is going to be wood shortages. Agree with point 2 & 3 also.

 

Its a hard thing to regulate right but some kind of regulation is comming to try & improve air quality. I suppose the real sensible regulation would be a massive national project  & subsidies to retrofit buildings with insulation (preferable eco & recycleable insulation) , & make all new buildings above passive house standard.

[SteveA]

16 hours ago, Stumpy Grinder said:

So, my HETA Inspire 45 woodburner is claimed to have an efficiency of 84% when burning wood. Are you claiming that to be incorrect? If so, please elaborate on what tests you have done to disprove this? Or, are you giving out more hot air than my flue?

SG

It's accurate according to whatever method they use to calculate to get to that figure.... but in the real world there is a huge loss of the heat in a woodburning stove that goes up and out the chimney & very little mass to absorb heat from the actual stove itself.

 

Something else to consider is that a rocket mass heater (or masonry heater, etc) could use 1/8th of the amount of wood to heat a given space.... so when applying your typical woodburner efficiency methods to that the maths just doesn't add up; ie, how is it even possible to exceed 100% efficiency?!

 

Basic discussion around that subject here: 

Cheers, Steve
 

Edited May 24, 2018 by SteveA

[difflock]

Bollocks ! ! !

Any decent respectable brand-name wood stove, that anyone with owt approaching brains ud buy,

has loads of cast iron to modulate the heat output,

and hitting 75-85% efficiency,

means a rocket stove must be 8*80%=640% efficient, which canny compute, ye ken, like ! ! !

regards

disgusted-of-Dervock

[Paul in the woods]

2 hours ago, SteveA said:

Basic discussion around that subject

They're not really selling the concept, are they? A masonry stove is something I'd be interested in but I'd like some basic numbers first.

 

I understand the efficiency of wood burners is often net, i.e. they ignore the heat used to remove any moisture. (So, 85% efficiency becomes 70%) but that's the same as a masonry stove.

 

The difference is that a normal wood burner has to keep the flu hot and if you're not careful heat from the house also goes up the chimney at night. However, what is the difference if you have a well insulated chimney and let the fire die down at night and close it off (or have an outside air feed)?