As someone who suffers through winter smog caused by people in my county heating their homes with wood, please please please use a modern efficient heating source instead of this neopasotral quackery.
I live in a very rural area where wood burning for heat makes a lot of sense. We have vastly too much deadwood on the ground and it is a serious fire hazard. There is simply no other economic way to dispose of it than to burn it. Most of it gets burned in vast piles by the county and forest services. From my lot, I divert a few cords per year of that to my woodstove. Either way it is going up in smoke. This way, for an acceptable amount of labor, I heat my house and save about $1,500 a year in propane charges.
This is less healthful for me than propane in terms of indoor air pollution. But it is more healthful in terms of exercise and fire prevention. I've accepted that compromise with the help of an air purifier that stays on all winter. Also, when I can get all of my fuel within a few hundred yards of my front door, most of the extraction and transportation costs go away.
And there's something else that's very important to me: When I burn propane, I micromanage the thermostat to save money. I wear heavier clothes all winter and end up tolerating being more cold and uncomfortable. With wood fuel being so much more economical, and surfing the edge of comfort less practical, I just keep the woodstove going all day and cool the house at mid day by opening some windows ... getting fresh air that I just don't get when using propane. So the house is mostly warmer all day than with propane, and I'm wearing less and generally more comfortable.
It's a pretty easy choice for me. I'd like to keep it up as long as I'm physically able.
He’s not saying that wood heat isn’t practical or rational for you, he’s saying that the byproduct of smoke and particulate matter imposed as a negative externality on your neighbors is not fair.
I live in a semi rural heavily forested area where wood heat is an option. I definitely notice the drop in air quality when winter comes around. Part of the problem is that for whatever reason wood smoke from stoves tends to hang out at ground level and cover the area rather than rising away. I don’t get any benefit from wood heat, but I do suffer the costs…
It can, but it requires building around heated seating in a building. You have an intake, a horizontal inlet pipe, a firebox, and then a 90° into a chimney inside of a dome, made of thick clay. You then use a horizontal outlet to the dome near the floor, with a rectangular cross section a ratio to the interior chimney size, ideally, and you build concrete or clay benches, bedframes, etc around your room, with these rectangular exhausts in the middle.
The fire gets going very hot, burns off all of the stuff that comes out of wood, on purpose, to turn into heat, which heats the masonry, which will stay warm for a very long time. The dome also radiates heat for a very long time. The final outlet, out of the house, expels tepid, wet, clean air; contains only CO2 as a byproduct, iirc.
My question was specifically about burning of deadwood for forest management, which apparently is available in huge quantities that need to be disposed of, but perhaps not consistently enough to e.g. use it to heat a city hall or gymnasium.
There seemed to be a small wave of pellet furnace installations in Germany 5-10 years ago or so. From what I heard, pellets became so expensive in the meantime that new installations declined. Long story short: there is demand for wood pellets. The price is about 300€/(metric) ton right now.
I also heat water with my stove. 2 hot water tanks, the first tank is unpowered has cold city water coming into it and is ran through a coil on my wood stove and then cycles back into the tank with a hot water pump. The second tank is powered and draws from the first tank. So cold city water is heated prior to going to my second tank it saves me lots of power each year.
I'm from Northern Ontario, and I agree that wood smoke can be killer, especially below -30°C (-22°F) when the smoke stays near the ground. Oven stoves, according to the article, address this. The section "Complete combustion", is all about this issue:
> Wood can be burned without too much air pollution, but then the temperature has to be high enough: 1100 to 1200 degrees Celsius. In that case, 99 percent of the wood is converted to CO2 and water vapour, almost without smoke. A metal wood stove, however, only reaches a temperature of 650 to 700 degrees, with an incomplete wood combustion as a result.
Are these significantly different in mechanism from so-called "rocket mass stoves"? I remember reading about those a few years ago. Seems like they burn very "clean" and require relatively little fuel to heat a home.
Rocket stoves are efficient when they're small, you have to have a secondary gassification byproduct burn chamber. I can't remember what the whole heat system is called, but it involves a lot of cob and clay.
Biofuels like wood can be roughly carbon-neutral, since growing them absorbs atmospheric CO2, and burning them releases that same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere.
Though obviously this isn't the case if the wood comes from badly-managed forests that are not replanted. And there are other effects that can make wood fuel carbon-positive:
True, but it doesn't matter. After you burn the wood, you are adding carbon that doesn't need to be there. The physics don't distinguish between carbon that is produced by a short carbon cycle or a long one.
In the case of wood, the carbon is accessed from, and ultimately returned to, the active biosphere. It's not fossil fuel that's been sequestered for 100s of millions of years, but was itself captured largely within recent decades.
Contrasted with burning coal, oil, or gas, preferred.
(Woodfuel may still be burned unsustainably, that's a separate question.)
Noted FWIW in TFA:
[U]nlike gas and oil, wood is a renewable and CO2-neutral fuel (the CO2 that is produced by the burning of wood was taken out of the atmosphere by the tree during the years before). The problem is that wood stoves are not very efficient, and extremely polluting.
Whilst it is for burning fossile files, when you’re burning the wood that grew on your property over the past 20 years, the carbon cycle is much shorter. Especially if your property grows it all back, it’s a closed carbon loop.
Modern heating is not nearly as cheap as wood heat, at least around me. The problem is not wood burning as much as it is burning unseasoned wood. There should be strict regulations for firewood sellers ensuring wood is seasoned properly but what happens is every year some guy with a truck cuts a bunch of wood and sells it with very little seasoning. This creates the smoke you are experiencing. I can heat my home for about 2 months for $300 where any other heat would cost significantly more. Not just heat my house but heat it to the point I can walk around in my underwear. I've never been able to afford to do that with any other type of heat. Furthermore I have 2 hot water tanks. The first one is connected to the second and city water enters the first tank and the first tank is not powered. It does run to my fireplace through copper pipe and a copper coil at the stove. So for the price I pay for wood I get excess heat and hot water. No other heat can come close.
Purely out of curiosity (I've never permanently lived somewhere where woodburning stoves were essential for home heating): is this because people are over-burning wood to compensate for the slow warming-up time, or because the stoves themselves are inefficient, or something else?
When I was young (~10 years old), we installed a wood-burning stove in the family-room of our house. My dad had a lot of family and friends who were farmers and were in constant need for tree removal.
Our heating costs dropped so significantly that the Gas company called, concerned that we weren't running our Natural Gas fired furnace and that we might need financial assistance.
We heated this way for many years after he died. I took up the responsibility of cutting down trees, splitting wood; and keeping the house warm. It is A LOT of work, but worth it if you have access to the trees/woodlots.
In the future (if this housing crisis ever ends), I will be adding a Rocket Mass Heater to my home. There is nothing in the world that compares to the feel of a roaring fire on a cold winter. One year the power went out in a very large geographic region that affected a large portion of the population. No electricity meant that no furnaces were running; so we had some elderly neighbors and family move in with us. They could have easily died without our wood-stove running. We even used it to cook on!
It's very cool that you will be adding a rocket mass heater. They fascinate me endlessly (I've posted about them here before) and are what led me to read about masonry heaters. It's unfortunate that RMHs are so difficult to insure, but I hope that building one is in my future as well.
The stoves just put off a lot of particulate pollution. Stoves don't completely combust the wood or do so at the wrong temperature which results in much more pollution than burning an equivalent energy amount gas.
That certainly makes sense; I've only ever used fireplaces and you can visibly see the particulate those emit.
I'm guessing it's outside of the economic envelope in which people are burning wood anyways, but the article makes it sound like combusting at the "right" temperature essentially solves that problem. But I suppose at that point you might as well just burn something cleaner and retain the other advantageous parts of the design.
Look up rocket stoves, and rocket mass heaters. Properly built, they effectively produce only co2 and steam, even all carbon monoxide is consumed.
Of course, since each rmh is custom built, you need to actually test the exhaust of every one to ensure it works as intended.
Mine is pretty swell, albeit a tad annoying to keep going if we leave for a few days and the whole mass cools. With that said, it uses about 1/10th the wood of a new high efficiency wood stove we use in a different building.
Reading that article, I am curious as to why they say that rmh are less efficient than tile stoves. The exhaust temp on mine is around 130-150 degrees F- cooler than a fresh cup of coffee. And yet, I get pretty complete combustion- so all of the heat from the wood is captured inside my house.
I recently saw a claim that rmh can produce less CO2 for the same heat than gas furnaces, though that was just someone on the internet, I would definitely want more research to claim that.
What are the other major sources of air pollution / particulate pollution in the Bay Area?
There's no coal consumption to speak of. There's diesel fuel consumption, though that is largely concentrated on transport corridors (I-80, I-580, US-101).
Wildfire emissions all but certainly swamp woodstove usage.
That said, yes, a small number of poorly-tuned fireplaces can create a large amount of smoke. Where the intent is actual useful heating, and not fireplace-as-decoration, thats' a solvable problem.
My understanding is that here in NYC the single largest (non-industrial?) source of air pollution is heating oil. The city banned the two worst heating oils back in 2015, but with a long phase-out period[1]. I would have expected the situation to be the same in most other cities, although SF's weather certainly doesn't justify oil burning the way NYC's does :-)
Less that its so common, more that a small percent of people cause all of that pollution. They usually convince themselves they are being environmentally friendly because "I just use the wood I already have from my land!!" And the rest of us suffer their refusal to use a modern heating source.
This is less healthful for me than propane in terms of indoor air pollution. But it is more healthful in terms of exercise and fire prevention. I've accepted that compromise with the help of an air purifier that stays on all winter. Also, when I can get all of my fuel within a few hundred yards of my front door, most of the extraction and transportation costs go away.
And there's something else that's very important to me: When I burn propane, I micromanage the thermostat to save money. I wear heavier clothes all winter and end up tolerating being more cold and uncomfortable. With wood fuel being so much more economical, and surfing the edge of comfort less practical, I just keep the woodstove going all day and cool the house at mid day by opening some windows ... getting fresh air that I just don't get when using propane. So the house is mostly warmer all day than with propane, and I'm wearing less and generally more comfortable.
It's a pretty easy choice for me. I'd like to keep it up as long as I'm physically able.