[cjenken]

I have an outdoor wood furnace. It's great at cutting down smoke as it has a re-burner section that keeps the temperature high enough that their is almost no smoke once it gets up to temperature.

But there is a lot more maintenance with something like this. I have to have about 6 cords of wood to make it through winter (which mostly comes off my property) but that also means handling the fuel (bucking and then splitting the wood as well as having the space to let it season for a year to dry it). Filling up the furnace once or twice a day depending on the weather. Cleaning out the ash once a month. And now that it's getting older (8 years) I have to fix up some of the welds inside the main chamber.

I don't mind the extra work as it saves a lot of money in electricity bills and all that splitting of wood has been good exercise. But I wouldn't recommend it unless you have the time and energy to do the work.

[brnt]

No smoke, but what about particulate matter? I understand these efficient wood burners are major urban polluters even without the smoke. They sure don't seem to smell any less.

[cjenken]

Once the temperature within the furnace gets to about 900F I can't even really smell it anymore and the exhaust looks clear as far as I can tell in daylight. This is the benefit of using a large and well built wood furnace. Also all of the wood I use is dry which not only reduces the amount of bad stuff that gets into the air it also increases the usable heat from the wood.

I also live in a very rural area on a 1 hectare lot surrounded by other 1 and 2 hectare lots. I would not want to run this in a typical suburb and I agree with most the other comments that wood burning really shouldn't be a thing in densely populated areas.

Unfortunately for me my only other real option is electricity which can be relatively intermittent where I am and also expensive. It would end up costing $700-$1000 extra during winter months. I'm heating two homes with it. A newer one with walls at an R40+ rating and an older one with walls at a recently upgraded from nothing to an R20 rating. The money I'm saving on electricity will be going into add more insulation into the older home for even better long term benefits.

Check out the below site if you'd like to learn a bit more about what the typical issues are and what's trying to be done to help reduce the problems. https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/strateg...