<blockquote><cite>Posted By: Brianwilson</cite>
Posted by JS Harris
Although the burden of proof needed is only on the "balance of probability" rather than "beyond reasonable doubt" it would still be very hard to positively connect ill health with a smoke nuisance, all you would end up doing is having opposing sets of expert witnesses giving conflicting evidence
JS- There is a wealth of peer reviewed and Gov data confirming direct correlation between exposure to any PM pollution and a variety of health problems , wood burners are known to produce large quantities of avoidable hazardous PM pollution plus a variety of nasties, the only defence I can see is a requirement for proof of the source because the pollution is not labelled. In Mikee’s situation the source would appear obvious , the route of the pollution recordable and the unfortunate result recognised damage to health.
</blockquote>

Not my point at all, my point was about the probability of winning a case like this for damages in a civil court.

I've given evidence as an expert witness. What happens is that the court/jury hear experts on both sides giving credible reasons to support the plaintiff's and the defendant's side.

The plaintiff has to prove, on the balance of probability, that their injury or ill health, and the precise extent of it, has been caused by the actions of the defendant, and that those actions were preventable (i.e.not involuntary). This is an extremely tough test for claimants affected by illness, as some, like asthma, bronchitis etc are rarely caused by one factor and the defence will argue that the claimant either had a pre-existing condition, or would have become ill anyway. The plaintiff has to prove that the smoke ingestion was the cause, and provide proof of the degree illness that the defendants actions have resulted in, not just suggest it may have been the cause. No matter what medical evidence the claimant presents you can be pretty sure that the defence will come up with evidence to counter it, perhaps uncovering some underlying childhood ailment, for example, that made it a possibility that the claimant would have been likely to get ill anyway.

The court, or perhaps in rare cases a jury, has to decide which set of experts to believe, and that is far from a forgone conclusion in my experience. Notwithstanding the documentary evidence available that shows that smoke and particulates MAY cause illness, the court can only accept what is actually presented to it by witnesses. If witnesses on behalf of the plaintiff present evidence to show that smoke and particulates MAY cause illness, then you can be certain that those on behalf of the defendant will debunk that evidence as best they can. The defence will also play heavily on the degree of uncertainty as to the likelihood of the plaintiff's illness actually being caused by the emissions caused by the defendant's actions, rather than some other cause.

It's never clear cut when something like this goes to court, even though in our eyes it perhaps should be. That is the point I was making.

Just read through the GBF link Brian provided and it makes interesting reading, although if past experience is anything to go by, few on this current thread will bother following the link and reading through the thread.

Pity, because there are some interesting web sites linked to within the thread, including...

http://burningissues.org/car-www/index.html

http://www.3sc.net/airqual/

Posted By: Mikeee5The air quality monitor has just been delivered. I`m not sure whether to put it next to my neighbours chimney or his van now!!!

Make sure it is not near his van, don't want a false positive. Are you going to publish the data so we can all have a look at it and see what it shows, many hands make idle work.

Brian,

though you maybe right about the situation in Austria you need to qualify it with a points:

1. That wood burning is used by a far higher % of people in Austria than here in the UK
2. Austria is far ahead of us when it comes to exhaust emissions indeed it is amazing how backward the UK is in this point compared to some other EU countries.
3. Due to the mountainous geography of Austria much of the wood burning emissions are trapped in the valleys.
4. As the BBC report highlighted, all the experts thought things were getting better because they were looking only at certain types of pollution and only discovered their mistake when they broadened their scope. Maybe other forms of heating are only better than wood burning because of what is been looked at!

What strikes me very much about the British mentality of the last decade or so is the idea it either ticks the box or not. Its all good or all bad. The way forward on the energy is three fold in my opinion

1. We need to generate our energy through multiple sources not just one way.
2. Energy source should be local not hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
3. Due to point 2 there should only be as many people living in an area as it can sustain. This means that the population of the southeast needs to be decreased dramatically not increased as per present policy.

well rant over

Jonti

John & Jonti – Are you implying it is ok to degrade air quality if the community currently enjoys clean air, if so then I maintain you are being ‘naughty’. Reference ‘clean’ Austria this OECD report details PM pollution in Austria is more than double UK levels!
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/environment/
It is understood that serious wintertime air quality impact of wood combustion is a recognised problem in other Countries such as Canada and New Zealand.
The Austrian PM limit for boiler emissions is reported to be 60g/ Gj of energy in, Scotland details a much lower 20g/ GJ limit for boilers. Sadly reality destroys the myth, a current proposal for a small biomass combustion to energy plant on the Scottish Isle of Arran details burning 40,000 tonnes of freshly felled timber with 50% plus water content in a Kohlbach K12 furnace tied to a turbine in order to produce 2.5MW gross power. The emissions parameters indicate PM burden will be 228g/Gj of energy in, this equates to exhaust emissions from diesel vehicles travelling 39 million km/day on the Island. On Arran it means this one plant will create 90% plus of all hazardous air pollution and therefore deliberately degrade air quality with consequences . The applicant considers the pollution is ‘acceptable’, the justification for this plant apparently is that the timber currently goes into production of paper at a price that results in a cost to the public purse but diverting the resource into this low efficiency highly polluting burning process ignores the high subsidy for burning and the impact to health from PM and NOX pollution as detailed in various reports including the BBC R4 prog. Producing paper that can be recycled a number of times with serious energy savings before burning would appear to be a far superior use for the resource.
Where is the joined up thinking and incentives to employ BAT in order to protect health and environment? The sad reality in the UK is combustion systems often appear to be designed to maximise profits from public subsidies and to stretch any loose regulations in order to avoid the cost of effective abatement techniques. The Arran project will produce 10,000 cubic metres of air pollution per tonne of feedstock and 60,000 litres of contaminated water per day.
We know there is no safe minimum limit for exposure to the hazardous pollution created so are we really saying it is ok to deliberately increase pollution in currently clean environments, if so, why? We cannot all go to the Austrian mountains to get above the pollution.
We know pellet burning produces far lower PM pollution , would legislation allowing only pellet burning in the UK cut-out abuse and reduce the impact on folk like Mikee. I note Drax are to be given extra subsidy to allow import millions of tonnes of value added pellets from the Americas. Balance of payments impact?
Apologies Mikee for unthreading , just trying to increase impact awareness, sorry for the rant folks will now return to banging head against wall. Rgds Brian

Hi Brian,

no I am not implying it is ok to degrade air quality if the community currently enjoys clean air but just making the point that the facts need to be looked at in context or do you believe it is alright to use facts taken out of context to justify a point of view?

Brian, whilst I agree with the basis of what you say I find your inability to accept a point of view that is not exactly the same as yours lessens the weight of your argument.

Jonti

Does anyone know how far particulates can travel?

And of particular interest because of John's reference to cross-boundary pollution...

http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/78657/E88189.pdf

Very odd units to be trying to understand or to be working in. decimal feet too!

Posted By: tonyVery odd units to be trying to understand or to be working in. decimal feet too!

How best would you describe a volume in the imperial measurement system.
7 cubic feet plus 13 cubic inches and an extra 7/16th of a cubic inch
Or use the cube root of a foot.

Posted By: Mikeee5I will take a reading outside in the morning to see if there's much difference.

Take random reading thought the day and night for a few weeks when the fire is not on.
If you want to get posh about it, and take a guess at the standard deviation (or estimate it properly from a weeks continuous run) using Standard Error = Standard Deviation / Square Root of Samples

Or you could use the mean differences in air quality from the chart as your Standard Error (25 + 50 + 250 + 650) / 4 and the hours in a year 8760 as your sample number:

So Standard Error = 244 / 94 = 2.6 That would be below the accuracy of the instrument, so you could just trust the number the instrument gives and do a frequency distribution.
A frequency distribution is where you 'bin' data. So your bins yours bins could be:

>=0, <25
>=25, <50
>=50, <100
>=100, <350
>=350, <1000
>1000

Hopefully there will be a time stamp for each sample which you can correlate with both the burn times and your asthma. Make sure you keep a log of all your attacks as there may be something else triggering it (and it is the asthma you want to improve really, regardless of what your neighbour is doing, took me years and hundreds of 'tests' to realise that it was a preservative in tinned 1970's beer that was making me wheeze).

Hi Jonti- Ref you comment “no I am not implying it is ok to degrade air quality if the community currently enjoys clean air but just making the point that the facts need to be looked at in context or do you believe it is alright to use facts taken out of context to justify a point of view?” Can you be more specific in your accusations please because I am but a simple person . Should it be that you refer to my comments on the BBC R4 programme, it did feature diesel vehicle emissions but highlighted PM and oxides of nitrogen as the ingredients causing serious health problems. We are aware biomass combustion emissions contain substantial quantities of these hazardous pollutants. The prog. Went on to claim vehicle emissions were responsible for increase in wintertime air pollution in suburbs, my immediate reaction “I do not believe it” like Tony I feel biomass combustion impact should be considered. My reference to the reported wintertime PM pollution problem in Austria could have equally referred to other Countries with declared wood burning impact problems such as New Zealand, US and Canada as linked by Dave. It is noted that a report from Canada details wintertime PM pollution levels in the suburbs of Montreal are 5 times higher than summer due to wood burner impact.
The report on transboundary pollution linked by Joiner details the high level of PM 2.5 pollution input created by wood burners, it also indicates the distances travelled by various air pollutants which should answer Steamy’s query. Worrying for the good folk on the Continent when we are currently building large biomass plants on the Coast.
John - just to clarify I did not claim that the UK creates less air pollution than Austria, only referred to OECD report, the report surprised me when aware UK is known as the dirty man of Europe and we face large fines for non-compliance with need to reduce air pollution. It was disturbing to hear the BBC report that UK Authorities allegedly deliberately reduce PM immediately adjacent to monitoring sites in order to present a more favourable outcome.
Jonti- Alternative opinions are always welcome especially if they make a positive contribution to the need to minimise the health impact of air pollution created by our choices of energy production. Sadly the future does not look good, I read today where a Biomass plant operator is investing locally in the education of children on the subject of renewable energy. Their local plant is scheduled to produce hazardous pollution equating to diesel vehicles travelling 11,250,000 km/day locally, Councillors claim the plant will enhance the environment.
We could make a positive contribution by restricting biomass fuel to accredited, hopefully locally sourced pellets which would provide fuel of a known standard and help cut-out the abuse that exacerbate the Mikee problems. Just a thought!

Jonti- I agree the anticipated emissions savings by the use of diesel appear to have backfired, sadly the same problem applies to wood burning. Anticipated CO2 emissions advantages appear to be far outweighed by the impact from the hazardous pollution. Take a typical wood stove creating 4g of PM/hr, this equates to 800km travelled by a diesel car (EURO 5 &6 diesel car and light commercial emissions PM .005g/km). The wood stove creates more hazardous PM pollution in 24hrs (19,200km equivalent) than the average diesel car in a year.
The wood burning appliance pollution can be dramatically reduced by the use of pellets and I note in Scotland they are retrospectively fitting ceramic filters to biomass boilers at schools and public buildings in order to reduce PM pollution.
This Nordic study details anticipated wood appliance PM pollution and possible abatement techniques
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:Il7gx-MchjoJ:www.umad.de/infos/cleanair13/pdf/full_94.pdf+Nordic+wood+stove+emissions&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShohV_3IKttuV_mhQ01izC0aqvy_dXrpXuFhSW1jezGN8rWONPdA9HGUoWwtLzmvXf6fF8_kkxeyjowHX6VmKI1x6NCSIFxAHBUD2UMVwR7homc9_T8FMC0DBk5u-YL760NYami&sig=AHIEtbQb08BnH-Lad5UFRN9q4DFjlie_FQ
John has detailed superior combustion processes that could be embraced in the UK and utilise our massive coal reserves but sadly the administration appear to favour import of low energy density fuel thousands of miles to burn in low efficiency power plants. I note on the Arran biomass proposal the applicant claims advantage in not embracing gasification or pyrolisis technology but using simple moving grate.
We surely have to take the action needed to minimise health and environmental impact.
I would suggest at domestic level all appliances are fuelled by graded pellets and fitted with effective PM filters bringing hazardous PM pollution below equivalent oil and nearer NG.
There is no excuse for the unfortunate pollution situation Mikee is facing when we have the knowledge to avoid it.

Posted By: JoinerAnd my memory of the reasons why diesel was being pushed as the fuel of the future, back when diesel was rarely seen in cars, was because it gave superior mpg, which meant that oil reserves would therefore last longer. It had nothing to do with emissions.

I seem to remember that too, but then cars were different, not much difference between the MPG of a gasoline and a diesel now, though you can refine more diesel from a barrel of crude. They have removed lead from gasoline and fitted catalytic converters, did not at that time do much about improving emission from diesels (probably because of the low numbers and lack of research and understanding at the time 1970s and early 1980s).
Always a shame when legislation lags behind understanding and also when it is not applied equally to everything.
Surely any combustion, regardless of source, should have the same limits.

Mikeee 5

Could you establish what the make and model is of your neighbours fire.

It might just be operator error. Unfortunately modern woodstoves are not designed to be idiot proof and from what you say it could be as simple as educating your neighbour into correctly using the air control vents. I recently went to a recently installed house where the owner was complaining that he was using far more wood then expected and the stove never seemed to get hot. Turned out he had the top vent wide open to make the stove draw with the bottom vent closed. A simple close the top vent open the bottom vent and the stove got super hot with very little wood used. Obviously with the stove burning hotter the quantity of smoke is reduced.

Depending on stove you may be able to suggest fitting a ceramic filter selling it to the neighbour on the additional heat output and less wood usage. You would then get the added benefit of less smoke and pollution due to the secondary burn