"Who can we believe if we cant believe the scientists."

Well you have to challenge them. One of the reports you linked was done by a cancer trust. The tobacco industry run plenty of research projects showing no ill effect from smoking. Dans questions cant be answered as they are all unknowns. Too many variables are involved.

The damage is done in built up areas where the air is stale and concentrations of polluting people build up. If you live there then you need to be regulated, but people chipping in to suggest that all woodburners should be regulated/banned as any carcinogen is too much carcinogen are going too far.

Our roads are far more damaging and polluting than our woodburners. While I appreciate we are discussing this in depth as this is a building forum I think that people (usually without woodburners or with neighbours polluting their backgarden!) are overly against wood as a fuel. Sure it contributes towards P10s etc and the congregation of various P10s from lots of sources do damage in various guises and any amount is too much. However for people with limited income and a ready source of wood from sustainable sources and in areas of low population density it is a green method of heating.

Give me money and I will get solar panels.
Lets all ride bikes and save hundreds of thousands more lives (see my personal research in Nature Vol 12/999.....although at risk of our own!

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: adwindrum</cite>"Who can we believe if we cant believe the scientists."

The damage is done in built up areas where the air is stale and concentrations of polluting people build up. If you live there then you need to be regulated, but people chipping in to suggest that all woodburners should be regulated/banned as any carcinogen is too much carcinogen are going too far.

Our roads are far more damaging and polluting than our woodburners. blockquote>

I can vouch for this first hand. Until the age of 23 lived in Tamworth (think market town surrounded by countryside - but about 10 miles North of Birmingham). Then moved to West Bromwich (think industrial centre of the UK) lots of industrial chimneys, and 1 mile from where the M5 meets the M6. Within 1 year I'd got asthma.

6 years later I moved back to Tamworth and the asthma was massively reduced - I now only use my inhaler about 6 times a year rather than 6 times a day. However - I can still see that I have lasting damage (as I still get the occasional tight chest)! Will this have an effect on my life expectancy - who knows!

Maybe I have a genetic disposition to asthma or maybe the air is that "S**t!" that if you weren't bought up in it (and didn't die off in the first year) your body can't cope with constant immersion in PM2.5, Nitrous oxides and partially burned hydrocarbons floating around.

Worse for me is London where even though wood burning is probably rarer than cavity wall insualtion, every time I go there I end up with black crusties up my nose ! Yuck!

Simon

I,m sure thousands of people die every day as a result of smog, most of them in third world countries where they make the products that allow your asthma free clean eutopia. Traffic contributes to pollution (and global warming) but no mention of the swathes of conctrete and tarmac that need constant maintenance and stripe our green land so our unsustainable population can get around.

And then there's the wood burner with its evil pollutants. What about the millions of trees that need to be planted to keep up with demand or the existing woodlands that are now being looked after because the end user would rather pay their energy bills to the industry that looks after their local biodiversity rather than the energy suppliers who seem intent on destroying everything.

Stoves dont have to be the problem, get a good one, understand how to use it , fit it properly on a tall chimney , dry the wood properly and the benefits for your local envioroment far outweigh the negatives.

On the other hand, if things carry on the way they are, not only will smog rear its ugly head but people will die from house fires.

The real problem is the woodburning industry. HETAS churn out engineers who have attended a 2 day course and sat an open book exam, most of them have a fraction of the skills needed to offer a good, long lasting, safe and efficient installation in all site situations. Internet based box shifters will have us believe their cheap stoves will do the job and can be fitted as part of a weekend diy project. Hetas and Defra's testing is way behind other countries as can be seen when any old box with a door on is passed as long as the £20000 is paid. Add all this to a new generation of wood users who know no better and you have a recipe for disaster.

With a sensible approach there is not a problem, only the drive to plant lots of trees which actually promote clean air, mother natures filtration system!

I'm not asking for an anything-free utopia, just a reduction in unnecessary pollution through ignorance.

I heard today of a man who cooked sausages on top of a chiminea in which he was burning pieces of old fence panel - Yum!!

On that Billy Connoly programme last night where he travels across the North West passage, he was talking to a local who smokes his fish with driftwood. Now he may have got it from the Mackenzie river (freshwater-ish?) but I was told that driftwood that has come into any contact with seawater gives off all sorts of additional nasties - including cyanide.

Kippers anyone...?

25kg per urban person per decade? Seems awfully dangerous stuff if so.

That was ironical.

Yes, smoke is dangerous in some circumstances, like if you are cooking on an open fire with no chimney in an African hut and it caused significant health problems in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries because of the very large quantities of poor quality coal that was burnt. But to claim that burning 25kg of smokeless fuel or properly burned dry wood pppa causes a huge increase in death rate is alarmist nonsense.

A typical house would need getting on for a tonne of coal pa for heating and hot water. If we went back to that sort of consumption then there probably would be an increase in health problems but that would create orders of magnitude more pollution than the amount that you claim is so dangerous.

BTW, I think wood burning in urban areas is a bad idea and rather anti-social because of the large amounts of smoke that people seem to manage to create with their fires, but that isn't a good reason to grossly exaggerate health issues about solid fuel burning.

Good to have authoritative info, Simeon - especially as counter-intuitive. How far we've come in only a couple of years, when we (or I anyway) thought individual wood pellet was the bees knees. Then it was about theoretical carbon-neutrality; now we not only know about all the fossil input in harvesting, processing and transporting bio fuels, and the 80% effective fossil content of the food that feeds the foresters, and the CO2 released from the forest floor and the damage caused to the soil by mechanised harvesting, but also the carcinogenic and other toxic load caused by bio fuel burning. Any fuel burning, whether fossil or bio, is a rotten temporary idea, due to be superceded once we actually notice the 17,000-fold super-abundance of solar radiation.

"now we not only know about all the fossil input in harvesting, processing and transporting bio fuels"

Usually done locally and delivered locally. Commuters will use a lot more fuel driving to work to earn the money to pay for solar panels than I will do each year for logs.


"and the 80% effective fossil content of the food that feeds the foresters,"

Well we gotta eat even if we work in a solar panel factory. ( I grow most my own food)


"and the CO2 released from the forest floor "

Stored there because the forest was well managed and will be stored again unless planted with crops


"and the damage caused to the soil by mechanised harvesting,"

I would suggest this is the timber forests for building "green" houses not the small scale timber for woodfires. (My wood gets rolled out by hand to the road.)

"but also the carcinogenic and other toxic load caused by bio fuel burning."

I guess almost anything is carcinogenic, its proving it, and balancing it with alternatives. I repeat that the flaws in the surveys quoted by Simeon are that they werent linked to woodsmoke from well run fires, (or even fires in several cases - just particulates). Death rates improve with medicines, education etc There are so many variables. I am not saying the woodsmoke isnt dangerous, it is, but there are so many other things to consider. As stated several times now, a blanket ban on wood fires is whats needed, but until a cost effective alternative comes along, lets bring in legislation to reduce the worst offenders.

This forum has got me out of lurking mode where I have been ever since the early multifoil tourneys. Please therefore be civil to this my first posting.

I am a primary school governor in rural Wessex, responsible for upgrading the premises. In the public sector there is an apparently bottomless bag of cash for decarbonising schools and I have been systematically exploring it; thus upping insulation, cutting draughts and so forth first, running thermal modelling (IES) and generally investigating the best options for reducing the 8000 litres of oil that the school uses. Pro bono incidentally (no commercial interests).

PV and Solar thermal have initially been discarded because of the blindingly obvious 300 acres of adjacent woodland so a woodchip boiler is being considered. You lot have all put the wind up me for dreaming about this with your talk of pollution. Currently the oil being burnt must be pretty unpleasant to young lungs but are you suggesting that a modern (probably Austrian) system is better or worse?

And if so what is the responsible way of quantifying the risk?

I dread to think of the outlay for solar panels to cover £8000 of oil consumption! But in conjunction with wood boiler - no problem. The"anti wood fundamentalists" are spouting about concentrated city dwellers burning scraps of wood in poor fireplaces. A modern wood boiler with a decent flue shouldnt be any cause for alarm. As you say the boiler currently in place will probably be 20 years old with all the consequences of an old machine attached.
Dont get the fear from this forum, its a debate where opposite poles fling mud from their viewpoints, none of us can hope to be right.....
300 acres attached to school????? If they have that sort of lolly get a professional in!!! And solar it should be!

We must all asap get off the habit of thinking of burning fuel, of any kind, when there's 17,000 times as much free solar energy falling on the earth, as the energy of all kinds that we've yet found ways to use from all sources. How to use free solar energy for most of our non-portable needs, especially for buildings? That's a tall order, a technique that used to be the only one available, but which we've well lost sight of. The present interim idea of switching from one fuel to another supposedly greener one will quite soon be seen to have been a capital-intensive blind alley. I say stick with your old system till you come up with a solar solution.