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In many western cities, the air is heavily polluted with wood smoke. Walking around suburbs of Seattle I see many of the older homes emitting thick white woodsm
by trailbits 5y ago
In many western cities, the air is heavily polluted with wood smoke. Walking around suburbs of Seattle I see many of the older homes emitting thick white woodsmoke from their chimneys. This is very bad for everyone's health. If it's not raining or windy, the air is bad most of the cooler days during the year. It seems absurd to me living in the very wet pacific northwest that more homes are not using renewable hydro power to efficiently warm their homes with heat pumps.
- rini17 5y agoBecause humans crave radiative heat. Heat pumps and other kinds of modern indirect heating can't make it. I'm thinking myself about installing some electric infrared panels due to spouse that keeps turning the termostat up and up to uncomfortable levels, or wants to burn wood.
- fy20 5y agoMy city in Europe is the same. On cold calm days we regularly have pollution warnings and recommendations to stay inside. Nobody burns coal here, this is just from wood. If you go to any village on the outskirts of the city (where there is no gas), almost everyone there will have a wood furnace used for central heating and hot water. These furnaces can fairly easily (with some financial investment) be converted to burn pellets, which burns a lot cleaner. These are sealed systems in a basement, not for ambiance as the sister comment suggests. Even in the city there are still enough old houses without gas to cause problems. My walk to the office goes past a couple of these, and I can feel the air quality is worse in this area. Newer houses usually use electric heat pumps, but older houses are poorly insulated so that would be very expensive there.