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> residential wood combustion serves almost no economic purpose It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives. And a lot more resilient in areas with unreliable pow

> residential wood combustion serves almost no economic purpose It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives. And a lot more resilient in areas with unreliable power.

flakeoil 4y ago
> It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives. Really? The efficiency is very low heating a house with wood unless you use it to warm water which is distributing the heat to radiators (and for heating warm water to the showers). Almost no-one who burns wood has this, people just have a chimney in the living room. And how do you feed the wood into the burner? Waste 10 minutes every hour, 24/7?
- grecy 4y ago
  I live in the North where -40 is common. I would say the vast majority of people have a wood stove, and they work exceedingly well. You might not be aware but ones that burn the wood twice (even three times) are now common and in fact are law in many places. So they're MUCH more efficient, and drastically reduce the particulates coming out the stove pipe. Another benefit is they only need to be fed once every 24-48 hours (depending on what heat you set the thermostat, what size stove you have, how well insulated your house is and what temperature it is outside.) Wood stoves are a necessity.
- hansvm 4y ago
  All it costs is your time, and not much of that since it replaces some of the time you'd otherwise spend exercising. 30hr/yr to break down a recently downed tree into firewood, 5min/day to clear out ashes and bring in new wood for the stove, and 1 min every 6hr to shove some new wood in the stove. You have gas as a more expensive fallback to keep things from freezing if you get lazy or are gone for awhile, and especially if a good job in the area pays $10/hr it's a no-brainer for most of the population to use wood heat. The stove pays for itself in less than a winter in gas savings.
amluto 4y ago
I don’t have actual data, but I strongly suspect that emissions from actual well-designed wood stoves are negligible. The problem is wood-burning fireplaces, which are a whole different animal. If you want to heat your house with a high quality wood-fired heater, be my guest. Nothing good will come of trying to heat your house with a wood-burning fireplace. They’re pretty, they’re fun, they crackle nicely, they combust wood very poorly, and they send almost all the heat right out the chimney. And, if they work correctly, lots of air comes out the chimney for the ride (keeping the combustion products out of the house), so a lot of makeup air comes in from outside, cooling your house. If you want to heat your house by burning something, you want to capture as much of the heat of combustion as practical (preferably the higher heating value, which condensing boilers and furnaces can do, but the lower heating value is a good start), and you want to minimize the degree to which operating the heater forces you to replace conditioned air in the house with unconditioned outside air. A fireplace fails at this.

> residential wood combustion serves almost no economic purpose It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives. And a lot more resilient in areas with unreliable power.

flakeoil 4y ago

> It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives. Really? The efficiency is very low heating a house with wood unless you use it to warm water which is distributing the heat to radiators (and for heating warm water to the showers). Almost no-one who burns wood has this, people just have a chimney in the living room. And how do you feed the wood into the burner? Waste 10 minutes every hour, 24/7?

grecy 4y ago
I live in the North where -40 is common. I would say the vast majority of people have a wood stove, and they work exceedingly well. You might not be aware but ones that burn the wood twice (even three times) are now common and in fact are law in many places. So they're MUCH more efficient, and drastically reduce the particulates coming out the stove pipe. Another benefit is they only need to be fed once every 24-48 hours (depending on what heat you set the thermostat, what size stove you have, how well insulated your house is and what temperature it is outside.) Wood stoves are a necessity.
hansvm 4y ago
All it costs is your time, and not much of that since it replaces some of the time you'd otherwise spend exercising. 30hr/yr to break down a recently downed tree into firewood, 5min/day to clear out ashes and bring in new wood for the stove, and 1 min every 6hr to shove some new wood in the stove. You have gas as a more expensive fallback to keep things from freezing if you get lazy or are gone for awhile, and especially if a good job in the area pays $10/hr it's a no-brainer for most of the population to use wood heat. The stove pays for itself in less than a winter in gas savings.

amluto 4y ago

I don’t have actual data, but I strongly suspect that emissions from actual well-designed wood stoves are negligible. The problem is wood-burning fireplaces, which are a whole different animal. If you want to heat your house with a high quality wood-fired heater, be my guest. Nothing good will come of trying to heat your house with a wood-burning fireplace. They’re pretty, they’re fun, they crackle nicely, they combust wood very poorly, and they send almost all the heat right out the chimney. And, if they work correctly, lots of air comes out the chimney for the ride (keeping the combustion products out of the house), so a lot of makeup air comes in from outside, cooling your house. If you want to heat your house by burning something, you want to capture as much of the heat of combustion as practical (preferably the higher heating value, which condensing boilers and furnaces can do, but the lower heating value is a good start), and you want to minimize the degree to which operating the heater forces you to replace conditioned air in the house with unconditioned outside air. A fireplace fails at this.