Smoke. It's bad. We need to Care.

Funny how so many of these anti-burning sites focus on comparing the woodsmoke to cigarrete smoke. I suspect that this is a trick, that cigarrettes just happen to not produce much particulate matter due to filters, dry fuel, very small amount of fuel, oily fuel, or whatever.

From above: 10#s of wood makes more (PAH) than 30 cigs. Well, I'd hope so. How many cigs are in 10#?

 

Agreed. Baby steps to stop all wood burning.

Never forget that we are the minority, easily squashed. Who is on our side? The folks that profit selling stoves at best. If there was huge profit in selling firewood such as oil or gas then we would have a balanced fight.

 

It seems clear from the woman's web site that outside wood boilers are the primary target of her activism, and they are certainly liable to criticism. Unfortunately her activism could cause considerable collateral damage for the larger wood burning community.

 

Point well taken, blindly defending wood burning will get you no where, best to know where you stand when the facts start to fly.

 

We have our interests, others have theirs. what we can do as responsible wood burners is practice good techniques and if we have an older non certified unit upgrade to one which is a cleaner burning device.

we need to pay attention to our fuel, ensure that it is properly seasoned and "ready to burn" before we use it. on that note , remember every tree that is dropped and fed to a woodstove (or paper mill or whatever) is one less tree that is scrubbing Co2 from the atmosphere. when you harvest youre fuel, take care to not disturb the smaller saplings around the area you are cutting in as they will be replacing the felled trees in the canopy and we want them as healthy as possible. replanting in many cases is a good thing, mix hardwoods with faster growing softwoods leaving enough room for these trees to grow to their potential. in replenishing the forest you cover two big aspects one, you rpelace the fuel you harvest, and in the environmental side you are replacing the natural "cleaning system" for the atmosphere that a tree is.

 

Really dont think you need to upgrade to a newer stove (unless you are hung up on numbers), good burning practices are a must though, easy to have a fire in a old stove that smokes very little to none depending on what part of the burn cycle you are in.

 

old tech stoves while much better than an OWB or an open fireplace are still far and away dirtier burning than a reburn unit will be even when you do not see smoke you are still exhausting way more PM out the stack.

ive seen tests on cat, noncat and exempt (35-1) units and i can tell you , no smoke out the dilution tunnel but the filters show a big difference even with a 35-1 unit that cant be "choked" back.

now these tests were run with "cribwood" but the arguement about the "real world" difference IMHO is not accurate as even though you may not get the same PM readings with cordwood as with crib wood, you will still see a monumental drop in emmissions compared to the older tech units

 

Like I said "unless you are hung up on numbers", and if you are then gas is your best bet.

 

of course im hung up on the numbers , its what i do for a living. numbers dont lie, they simply are what they are.

i think its laudible that folks who responsibly run their older stoves "do what they do" but at the same time i know what these new stoves can do by comparison, and there truly is no comparison.

for example, what BK is doing with cat stoves now is AMAZING! running obscenely long burn times with the emissions they are posting is just phenominal. there is no old tech stove that can begin to approach that kind of result.

 

I see the same thing in the diesel world. Tier 4 final emissions are now out and brand new machines are much more complicated then they ever were. If the emissions system fails the engine derates steadily till eventually it can only idle. Then I come out and play with my lap top to fix it.

There's no stopping this stuff. The best thing we can do is comply with our best efforts and be educated. It's not going to get any easier that's for sure.

 

I may be wrong but I believe this woman lived next to a "wood" burning neighbor from hell. She used to have a web-site with pictures of her next door neighbor's stack and yard who was burning anything and everything (think particle board, painted and treated wood and any other kind of scrap you can think of). He had it stacked all over his yard in piles and fed his home installed smoke dragon set up (in a sun-room) with a short chimney night and day. Guy had no regard for anyone including himself, complete jack-hole.

Unfortunate for her for sure but she does seem to casting the same net over all wood burners. I tried to locate her old site which I found linked from John Gulland's site a couple years ago but can't find it now. If anyone can verify or refute this please do.

 

i dunno, havent looked around on Johns site in a while,

one of the things that irritates me, is folks who burn their leaves, stinks to high heaven, and one fire like that makes more smoke than a months worth of woodburning in a stove.

 

She's probably responsible for 214 of those 214 complaints

 

bet you wont catch them comparing it to pot smoke

 

I am pretty sure that I have read that a single cigarette puts out about a gram of smoke.

 

Did a quick search and here's what I came up with. 1 cig weighs around .9grams. When burned they emit between 7-23mg of PM2.5. So average would be 18.5mg making it take 54 cigaretts to produce 1 gram.

 

Hmmm. 1 gram per hour for a woodstove is not common either. I'm sure 95% of the stoves on the market aren't able to accomplish that. I think most tube stoves are more in the 1-3 grams category. Correct me if I'm wrong. So really I guess it comes down to how many cigarettes you can smoke in an hour . I wouldn't know.

 

You missed my point Mike.

 

Coal plants are being converted over to natural gas since new laws for coal are in place.

 

http://www.forgreenheat.org/issues/promoting_clean_technology.html
This webpage is very informative. Scroll down towards the bottom and take a look at the bar graphs.