Carcinogen output of WBS.

[Countrypaul]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... risk-study

[Adokforme]

Wow CP, that's an eye opener for me and quite worrying considering how the focus has mostly been upon other FF's such as Coal and Diesel etc. I had read a previous report sometime ago that even in houses with fully enclosed woodburners, that just opening the door to add another log or two is sufficient to take air quality in the room for carcinogens etc beyond recommended levels.
I'm not sure that legislation is the immediate answer but certainly making the information freely available to the wider public may gradually entice people away from installing them in the first place. After all, which parent wants to subject their child or children to such fumes in their own home!
Not that our childhoods were so much better, what with coke boiler stoves, not mention inhaling secondary smoke from dads untipped Senior Service cigarettes. Of course those were times before we were made aware of the harm it could all do.
Not that I've any regrets, as the road and grass verges outside were devoid of cars and were used as a permanent playground by the many children I grew up with there. Happy days...cough!

[Mr Gus]

Get a meter then you are not needlessly worried nor speculating as to rooms levels.

A visit to ikea with all its chemical product off-gassing may concern you when you think about it, or inside an ICE car.

[Adokforme]

Get a meter then you are not needlessly worried nor speculating as to rooms levels.

A visit to ikea with all its chemical product off-gassing may concern you when you think about it, or inside an ICE car.

Thanks Mr G. It was more the contribution that WBS's make to the whole pollution mix outside beyond that of both petrol and diesel which was the concerning factor. Individually we can do little about that other than ensuring our own contribution is zero. We do get the odd whiff of woodsmoke outside occasionally, not sure though if thats not down more to a garden bonfire rather than a WBS.
But I can imagine people seeing WBS's as a means of cheaper heat, which they may well be, over current energy prices that are going to cause severe hardship to many thousands of households in the coming months. It would be bad enough seeing them installed anyway but for them then to fall outside the remit of any possible future legislation would be a double whammy to those who perhaps took an unitiated plunge.
Fortunately having an inbuilt aversion to spending money I seldom frequent large department stores of any persuasion, although our three piece suite is sadly beginning to look it's thirty plus years of age so we might have to break that habit soon by venturing inside one or two in search of a replacement. Not having an IKEA in the vicinity I doubt it's likely to feature anywhere on our list.

[Joeboy]

For myself, I source and harvest the trees I convert to logs. Every part of the process is done by myself. I try and maximise every joule emerging from the process and ensure the process is clean.

In comparison, how gas for example is brought to homes and that entire process and its own energy consumption and pollution? My way is golden, has no politics and reduces both my gas and electricity reliance.

Carcinogens? Nothing is perfect, so try and be as clean as possible in what you personally choose to consume. Regardless, someone won't like it.

[Mr Gus]

Adokforme

Getting a meter (like the one I linked to a while ago on Ali express) means you can use it in a variety of environments (I use meters in hotels, in mountain resort, up the mountain etc.

You could even shin up the roof (sort of thing) & take readings of a typical WBS output over a variety of seasons & weather scenarios in order to understand improvements / curtailments in burn technique. in the immediate area, ground level & beyond.

When I mention Ikea, I REALLY mean " any shop, any given day" plastic / foam offgassing from all sorts of materials, even in supermarkets food sections / general operations, or a carpet shop, wrinkle free shirts dipped in formaldehyde ..for instance.
Or a perfume counter in John Lewis / boots etc.
By smokers during a fag, afterwards with residuals etc.
In a pub, pizzeria etc.

In essence no-one should eat a wood oven-cooked pizza ever again (they are very popular in london as all over the country as market food.
No-one is going to ban the BBQ trade (gas bottle flame charred food nor chemical doused charcoal, chimneas etc, these are not given the same amount of thought nor headlines (which is wrong)

Its always fires, sometimes marked as WBS pollution sometimes not, We know there can be a big difference in combustion from different stoves, shonky chinese machine mart etc.
So whilst it is every quarter ok to bash out another duplicate piece on that sort of thing, they do no one any favours column filling with that subject matter repeatedly making many forget there are other things in our lives (likely a lot more charcoal BBQ's & instant BBQs sessions than we think IF someone added up the numbers with the pollutant figures included, or even a 5 thru 1 list of the worst offenders in that area)

Can they tell us the pollution levels inside a car also? (both a fine place for a monitor, & an easy column filler)

I'd be more impressed if they rigged a bunch of decent reporters up for a month with monitors & crunched data, one in a big city, one in the countryside, one near a medical waste incinerator, one by a city school on a main road, one in the countryside (people still clog roads there driving kids to school)
Domestic kitchen, restaurant kitchen, fast food kitchen.

Wide scale comparisons for info & context as to what we put ourselves & others through rather than what is beaten over & over.

Likely that would do more good & contextual comparisons of pollution levels types etc.
Just don't leave it to BBC yoof channels. (please god, no)

Whatever happened to the damage to woodburner efficiency ratings that steve? at st elsewhere brought up that the government were dumbing
down?

Also Catalytic converters, rarely a mention in the press about those on WBS & how much they knock particulate et al back.
(which Joe's has, also as mentioned before)
I understand they wish to inform, but they could do it a lot better than the mr mackey (southpark) approach.

[Adokforme]

Yep can't disagree with your summing up there. Thank you.
Afraid I'm not familiar with Ali express, perhaps before my time, reckon that would be an interesting piece of kit to own, although suspect not cheap!

[Oldgreybeard]

I've had a particulate sensor outside, connected to a data logger, for a couple of years now. We live in a (very) rural area and our nearest neighbour is a fair distance away. Every time they light their wood stove we get an air quality reading that is worse than that in some city areas close to busy main roads.

It seems really hard to get the message across that these things are really bad sources of air pollution. I read an article a few years ago that equated running a wood stove to having a dozen or more diesel cars sat on your drive idling. When I looked into it I found that most stoves were actually worse than that, and even the very best stoves, run by people that take great care to only burn well-seasoned dry wood, were pretty appalling pollution sources.

There seems to be a widespread myth that if you cannot see smoke then that is OK, when the reality is that the really, really dangerous stuff is invisible, and some of the "cleanest" stoves emit some of the highest levels of the really dangerous tiny particulates.

I fitted the finest filters available to the intake of our ventilation system, but they are nowhere near good enough to keep the really dangerous stuff out. We now turn our ventilation system off whenever we get a warning from the particulate monitor, which is usually when the whether is cold with little wind, conditions that seem to make the particulates from our neighbours stove settle lower around our house.

[Tinbum]

I've had a particulate sensor outside, connected to a data logger, for a couple of years now.

Interested in what make / model that is?

[spread-tee]

Blimey, feeling pretty guilty now

My problem is that over on the Ivan nort forum just ten years or so ago these things we championed somewhat as a way of reducing the reliance on fossil fuels for some people, and as I had an essentially free unlimited supply of timber we ended up designing our heating system around the woodburner and solar thermal, and spending a not inconsiderable sum setting it all up. Now just a short time later we are seen as the killers of cactusville

What the heck should I do?????

Desp