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Was governments clean air strategy launch fair on wood burning stoves?


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I would be interested to learn what others think about the government's attack on wood burning and multifuel stoves during the recent clean air strategy launch. Some points I would like to make:-

 

  • Talking about coal fires and wood burning stoves in the same breath is misleading. Coal fires are around 30% efficient while modern day stoves can be up to 80% efficient
  • Modern day stoves are more efficient than their counter parts from just 10 years ago
  • According to the industry, stove emissions are around 80% down on 10 years ago

 

I would be interested to hear supporting and opposing views.

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The press coverage is certainly trying to panic people, headlines are all about wood burning stoves but what detail there is does not actually seem that focused on wood burning stoves.  In fact it seems to be more focused wet wood and coal.  IMHO the devil is in the detail and we don't have the detail yet.

 

I think it is interesting that they might tighten wood burner emissions (by design of new products) but do not mention banning installation of new open fires.  Seems to me that someone is targeting what is easy to enforce rather than what is going to make a significant difference.

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On 23/01/2019 at 15:00, aesmith said:

I wonder how it will relate to multi fuel stoves.  To give an example, I think a basic Morso Squirrel would be compliant in a smoke free zone if burning approved smokeless solid fuel, but not if burning wood.  

The Defra approved Squirrel ( 1412) is compliant due to its tiecery air system,  the other Squirrels the design of which dates from 1950 are likely to be discontinued and replaced by the new 2850 wood burner,

A

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My view is that a lot of government policies government (not the governing political party, just 'government', all parties are the same) have an intention of good stuff but fail when it comes to money and quantifying.

 

We can quantify, legislate and count new efficient stoves being sold and installed but not older less efficient stoves currently instaled. If we really wanted clean air get these upgraded to more efficient models. Same we cannot count how many home owners open up a bricked in fire place, put in a grate and have an open fire even if these are the least efficient - too hard to count, legislate for and police.

 

Same as fuel - hit wood sales, easy to legislate and quantify log sales not so much the homeowner who collects their own / has it delivered and then who processes and dries wood themselves to produce 'fire wood', much harder to legislate and police that. Easy to tax a sale (even if the tax is a registration to a scheme to confirm the wood is dry), cannot tax free stuff so easily. Currently I can buy dry wood or as the winter goes on and my dry(self processed)  wood runs out I can just grab wood that is nearly dry for the last few weeks.

 

So good intentions, we all burn dry wood in efficient appliances but in practice they are legislating against the easy targets rather than changing things to their intention,

 

(think plastic bags as a good example, 5p charge reduced the amount of plastic we used.. but we still use the same plastic in the bags. 5p charge is easy to do, change the plastic bag matirials is a lot harder to do. Intention is good, implimentation didn't work fully)

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50 minutes ago, Steven P said:

(think plastic bags as a good example, 5p charge reduced the amount of plastic we used.. but we still use the same plastic in the bags. 5p charge is easy to do, change the plastic bag matirials is a lot harder to do. Intention is good, implimentation didn't work fully)

I'm with you mostly and this plastic bag thing has similarities in that a problem has been recognised  but they  don't know what to legislate to lessen the problem, in the end it will be the vast bulk of the public acting to reduce pollution and making it acceptable to prosecute those who don't. Just look how smoking in public places first  had to become socially unacceptable before legislation was put in place.

 

In the case of the plastic bags it was the plastic floating in vast rafts in the oceans which shows like blue planet brought to attention, it seems unlikely most UK plastic bags got as far as the ocean from consumer litter, more likely it was dumped from plastics exported for recycling. The more insidious plastic pollution, the primary microplastics  of a size  directly able to enter the food chain, come  from marine paints, cosmetics, clothes washing, tyre wear etc.. Obviously over time the bigger plastics become abraded and do also enter the food chain but if they were disposed safely locally...

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  • 2 weeks later...

I am always sceptical of new government initiatives as somewhere under the surface there is always a money grabbing scheme. If they were serious they would look at a recycling program for older stoves as they did for older cars a while back. Today's wood burning/multifuel stoves are very different and much more efficient when compared to their older counterparts. So the scare stories are misleading - but when did that ever stop a politician from pursuing their own agenda :)

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