81–90 of 116 posts
If you smell wood smoke your fireplace is either not an efficient design or you are burning the wood wrong. A modern efficient fireplace with a catalytic converter does a really good job at converting wood to heat.
What regulations does the UK have for wood burning stoves? Here in America we have pretty tight regulations on wood burning stoves for the particulate they can emit. Starting in 2020 new stoves can only emit 2.0g/hr of particulate, down from the 4.5g/hr that was the rule from 2015. Most stoves I’ve seen come in at 1.54g/hr, but I’ve seen a few down at 0.5g/hr. It’s not uncommon to see stoves with catalytic converters…
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There is a clear and important distinction between restrictions on how property can be used, and the government literally seizing property. Trying to argue that those are one and the same is just silly. A better parallel would be fining based on emissions, which I would be fine with. But actually seizing private property? Hell no.
> But actually seizing private property? Hell no. Yeah like your car being seized due to not paying the yearly registration fee?
Again, laws around how property is used are fine. There are all kinds of ways you can misuse your property that will result in it being taken from you; in general all of us are fine with that. It's legal to drink, and it's legal to drive, but if you drink and drive you might lose property or your freedom, probably both.
What's not fine is the government saying "you purchased this legally and in good faith, but it's not legal anymore and we're going to need to take that". This feels like a good idea when it's something with obvious negative externalities, but it is a wildly dangerous power to give the government. Especially since this power will almost certainly be delegated to the executive branch by the legislature, giving random un-elected appointees the ability to expropriate property without even a hint of deliberation.
Oh, and it's probably an ex post facto issue anyways. You generally can't punish people for something that was legal at the time that they did it. This is why various gun regulations almost always exclude all banned items that are currently in private hands, because attempts to take that property away would be unconstitutional.
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Low Tech Magazine is pretty much bullshit from cover to cover and these articles are great examples of the genre. Read the first one with a critical eye. It doesn't make any sense. It's just a deceptive argument constructed to make performative primitivism seem competitive with modern technology, which it isn't. An electric induction cooker is superior to any kind of fire, in all aspects and ways, by large margins in…
If you actually read the article you'll see that by "outperform" they're comparing the efficiency of a wood stove in converting biomass to useful heat, against the efficiency of a power plant and electric stove in converting fuel to useful heat. It's no surprise that a wood stove did better in that comparison. It's one conversion vs two. It's a perfectly reasonable comparison to make in many circumstances, eg in poor…
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Outdoor wood furnaces (boilers) became very popular over the last 15 years. They are cheaper than fuel oil. A traditional wood stove has to be refilled every 2 hours (or so), and is also a major fire hazard. "Wood burners" may also include pellet stoves which are also increasingly popular for similar reasons.
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 splitt…
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> You're also assuming it's appropriate for some government beurocrat to make such a decision on the first place. " China banned the country from getting pallets of plastic because once they factored in the public health costs, it wasn't profitable (and it was barely profitable before hand). The government bans people from driving while drunk because they have a potential to hurt others. We have precedence for the go…
There's a clear difference between prohibiting drunk driving, and telling me I can't continue to use my wood stove inside my own home.
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You still need to open them to fuel them, and people do that fairly frequently, which floods the space with particulates. > The results showed the burners were usually lit for about four hours at a time, and during this period the level of harmful particles in homes was three times higher than when stoves were not being used. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/18/wood-bur...
Presumably when the stove is not in use the amount of harful particles is very low. So a three times increase of a very small number is also very small.
> epidemiologists are increasingly recognising that exposure to high intensities of PM over much shorter periods of time—hours rather than days—is linked to a range of health issues .Indeed, Lin et al. found a significant association between hourly peakPM2.5andmortality rates across six Chinese cities. Similarly, a systematic review of 196 articles found a positive relationship between short term PM exposure and cardiovascular, respiratory, and cerebrovascular mortality
>Wood burners have become increasingly popular in recent years [...] Almost 16% of people in the south-east of England use wood fuel, and 18% in Northern Ireland, according to 2016 government data, and about 175,000 wood burners are sold annually. If you're wondering why they're so popular, it's because wood counts as "renewable fuel", so it helps EU countries meet their renewable energy targets. https://news.ycombin…
Ugh, and here I was really liking the idea of wood burning. I really liked how little of a climate impact it has... :( Other forms of heating is just so expensive in cold places though.
Around here I can get a months worth of wood for about 100-150$. A months worth of oil is about 1000$. Also wood heat is so hot an excessive I walk around in my underwear most the day. But with oil I can barely afford to keep the temp enough. I compare oil because most homes around where I live still have oil furnaces. I know lots of people that seek out wood stoves. I can’t imagine they can afford to have a choice a…