In my country outside of the city center (where most homes have district heating or gas), wood burning stoves are the most common way people heat their homes. C

In my country outside of the city center (where most homes have district heating or gas), wood burning stoves are the most common way people heat their homes. Coal never really caught on here, but there are abundant forests and not that many people, so there is always plenty of firewood that is easy to find. That combined with low temperatures during winter (somehow it causes pollution to stay low to the ground?) means the government usually issue air quality warnings to stay inside a few times during the heating season. There have been some attempts to improve the quality of the fuels used, e.g. funding to push upgrading to automatic pellet stoves which burn much cleaner, but most of the issue (which is also the case in the UK) is that older homes are simply poorly insulated and waste a lot of heat. The problem is by 'older homes' I mean anything more than 10 years ago, when the EU started pushing for lower energy use in housing. In the US that means today, for homes built to minimum building codes - which the majority of new housing is. We are building a new 160m2 home - to modern insulation standards - and even the smallest 5kW wood burning stove would produce too much heat for the house. We probably won't even need to turn on the heating (electric heat pump) until it gets close to 0c outside.