💬 I have wood burner regret, so here's your guide to 'eco' models and indoor pollution
I joined the wood-burner club last year. I’ll admit, it’s something I am starting to regret. We splashed out on an ‘eco-friendly’ stove for our kitchen/diner. As it’s a large, open-plan room, and one we spend most time in, we wanted a focal point and an alternative to the underfloor heating installed in the room. Costwise, underfloor heating and stoves are about the same to run , but the underfloor takes time to warm up; it’s quicker to get the fire going when you come home on a cold night.
Sadly no, says assistant professor at Nottingham University, James Heydon, who co-authored a study looking into links to wood-burners and indoor air pollution in 2020. Stoves are only checked for leaks and outdoor emissions, he says. “There has long been the idea that if you put a door on an open fire, there wouldn’t be any particulates coming into the house. But unfortunately, that’s not true.”
And this is what Haydon, a criminologist who specialises in ‘ordinary harm’, and his co-author, air quality scientist Rohit Chakraborty, are most concerned about. “Every time you open the door of the stove to refuel, fine particulate matter floods into the room,” Chakraborty says. These peaks take a few hours to disperse. “By the time it dies down, someone opens the door again to refuel and you get spike after spike.
I was curious to see if my stove stacked up against the Sheffield findings, so I bought a cheap air quality monitor on Amazon for £59 to test levels in my room for a week. On average, my monitor records levels up to 46.4μg/㎥, about the same as those in the survey, which found average concentrations ranging from 2.27 μg/㎥ to 47.60 μg/㎥.
Our lungs are exposed to so many different types of pollution on an average day, Hall says, so “teasing out what effect the wood burner has in terms of your total exposure is really quite tricky.” The Government’s new environmental plan for England this month set out new legislations to limit emissions but held back from banning stoves and opted instead for “educating” people on their use.
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