> Once they have exited your chimney, the toxic gases (e.g. benzene) and particles that make up smoke freely pass back into your home and into the homes of others. (Research shows that nearly 70 percent of chimney smoke reenters nearby buildings.) Children who live in homes with active fireplaces or woodstoves, or in areas where wood burning is common, suffer a higher incidence of asthma, cough, bronchitis, nocturnal awakening, and compromised lung function. Among adults, wood burning is associated with more-frequent emergency room visits and hospital admissions for respiratory illness, along with increased mortality from heart attacks. The inhalation of wood smoke, even at relatively low levels, alters pulmonary immune function, leading to a greater susceptibility to colds, flus, and other respiratory infections. All these effects are borne disproportionately by children and the elderly.
I really wish indoor wood burning, especially if not used for heating but luxury, would be banned at least in cities
like wtf. is it legal to harass your neighbors with smell and toxic fumes every day just because you want to feel a bit comfy (to clarify: I mean comfy by having a fancy looking fire place you use additional to your normal heating system because you like how it looks)
sure there are countries and areas in countries where for various sociology economical reasons banning it isn't acceptable at all and should not be done
but a ~4 million city where one of the _most costly ways to heat_ is by burning wood logs it's a bit of a different story ;)
and I know some parts of the city are poor and use very old ovens, but funnily they have less of an smell issue (I can't judge the toxicity) because they tend to burn preprocessed pellets for heating instead of not necessary well suited or fully dry wood for the looks
I really wish indoor wood burning, especially if not used for heating but luxury, would be banned at least in cities
It doesn’t need to be banned, it just needs stringent regulations to limit the particulate emissions. You can buy wood stoves today that emit less than half a gram per hour (0.5g/hr) of PM2.5 particulates. These modern wood stoves are also very efficient and beautiful to look at, so they provide a bit of luxury to go with their heating performance.
The problem with filters is they have a lower limit. PM2.5 cuts out much of the smell, but none of the carcinogenicity (PM0.1 or so). The only filter that really works is a sealed cap. Burning biomatter is just not worth the health impact or the cost and effort to mitigate. It's like capturing CO2: a stupid idea.
> While we're doing that, can we please also ban 2-stroke engines used for landscaping.
Why only for landscaping? These fucks need to be banned, period. It was a huge mistake to ban them in vehicles while grandfathering all the old crap in. Unfortunately mechanics keep decade-old two-stroke junk alive, and spare parts aren't even banned.
> Spare parts are manufactured and supplied into channels. If you ban that [...]
Easier said than done. You'd need to impose BATFE-style regulations and measures. You're talking about arresting people for selling partially manufactured parts, parts which they claim are actually for other things, plans for parts paired with uncut sheet metal, etc. Is a clutch illegal to manufacture if it happens to fit on some model of two-stroke motor, even though it could also be used for other things? Have fun getting tangled up in these weeds. And the only way you'd stand a chance of enforcing this is by threatening people with many years in prison for what are non-violent crimes.
People tolerate this sort of thing in the case of the BATFE because nobody really needs a machine gun, very few people have one in the first place, there's little parts commonality with other machines and because machine guns kill people in very visceral and obvious ways. But with two-stroke motors you have a whole ton of people who use these machines to save on huge amounts of labor (you're fucking with the way they put food on their table and pay rent, not just their fun at a gun range) and the alternatives are subpar. You exempt chainsaws from this, but that merely reflects what you are personally familiar with and consider reasonable. And even if the alternatives weren't subpar, you'd still be asking people to purchase new expensive machines instead of performing cheap repairs on machines they already own. Point is, the incentive and willingness to skirt two-stroke spare part bans would be much higher than with machine guns. Your bans would fail without extremely draconian enforcement.
Two stroke engine parts don't have a massive legally protected cult following like guns, nor are they high-cost many-times-repeated consumables like drugs. They're closer to antiques - some will collect them, most won't bother if they're not available.
Ban it and you'll stop major places from selling it, and minor places from widely advertising they have it. You won't stop anyone dead-set on continuing to do so, but you will stop most people because the cost will be higher and it'll be much harder to find.
If you're not shooting for perfectionism and won't bother to enforce a spar parts ban, then why propose a spare parts ban in the first place? Just ban the production/sale of new two-stroke machines, not the spare parts. As old machines wear the cost and effort of keeping them in service will eventually exceed the activation energy for buying a new machine. An unenforced ban of spare parts would accomplish nothing productive; it would waste your political capital and train a new group of people to have contemptuous disregard for laws.
With respect to the antique analogy, you have it completely backwards. Antiques are things which have outlasted their practical usefulness but are kept around anyway because people have some nostalgic or aesthetic affinity for them. Machine guns fall into this category; they are essentially fetishes (in the traditional nonsexual sense of the word). Virtually nobody is earning their living with machine guns. Two stroke motors on the other hand are in active use by thousands if not millions of people to earn a living. If they were in fact antiques, then they wouldn't be a problem in the first place because antiques aren't put to use. If you banned new production of two-stroke machines, the ones that already exist would gradually become antiques despite the existence of legal spare parts, and eventually the only people keeping them in running order would be the antique geeks who own it because they like it, not because they earn a living with it. The people who are actively earning a living with two stroke motors today are the people you [should] have a gripe with, the lawn care guys who run two-stroke leaf blowers in your neighborhood aren't antique collectors doing it for fun, they're guys trying to feed their children.
>Two stroke engine parts don't have a massive legally protected cult following like guns
Yes they do, they're called dirtbikes and a large part of America enjoys riding them. Other countries use them in the scooter form factor.
Could some of the use cases be covered by alternatives like the electric Surron? Sure. Will you successfully pass a law against them in the next 30 years? Not a chance.
Yeah, but my Stihl MS880 is still legal here in California… and likely will be for some time. Good luck getting a usable, heavy-duty chainsaw to work on any tech besides a two-stroke motor of some kind.
I have a Stihl combi-system which includes a polesaw attachment. It’s electric with a lithium ion battery backpack that weighs at least 20 lbs.
I love the thing. I’ve felled trees that are up to 8 inches in diameter and done some real cleanup work around my property with it.
It might be possible to make something for me but the average heavy chainsaw user needs to be able to trek into the woods and spend significant time away from any power source. Furthermore, I want to be nimble and able to drop everything and run when a tree starts moving. A heavy weight strapped to my back for real tree work is a death trap.
Firefighters have even more stringent requirements for their chainsaws in highly demanding environments. If you want to convince anyone that an electric chainsaw is workable, convince them first. Everyone else will be easier.
I use my bigger chainsaws for bigger trees (just took down a mature Monterey Pine that dropped its last needle) and some Alaskan milling. The latter takes a lot of power for a single pass. I’m already lugging 22lbs just for the power head, making that electric with similar capacity to a tank or two of gas will be completely impractical in terms of weight. That’s especially so in rugged terrain.
If you want it to last longer than 20 minutes it would weight about 250 pounds.
Chainsaws are at the very corner of tools that have to be both portable, handheld, and very powerful. This means that their energy source should very dense. Lithium does not come close for the big saws.
Urban tree climbing arborists (that need a small saw to chop limbs while up in a tree) now sometimes use battery powered saws that run off of an "umbilical"- a cable off of the saw runs to a separate (backpack or other container) battery. These saws are among the smaller chainsaws (maybe a 12" bar, sized for chopping limbs). The other extreme is a saw for bucking and felling medium and large trees, which uses a MUCH more powerful motor and a 30" bar or bigger.
I have 16-ish acres in the Santa Cruz mountains. Between my property and the aging neighbors who I share a driveway, there is plenty of opportunity for different sizes of chainsaw. I also live in a redwood log cabin with more redwood and other large diameter trees on the property. I originally purchased the bigger chainsaw for some Alaskan milling but it has come in handy elsewhere.
I would not recommend this chainsaw to the uninitiated buyer. It’s a lot of chainsaw and you only need money to buy the thing. Seriously, I’ve mentioned it to seasoned loggers and they raise an eyebrow and say as much. If I didn’t do Alaskan milling I wouldn’t have enough acreage to justify it.
> like wtf. is it legal to harass your neighbors with smell and toxic fumes every day
You say harass, I say enhance. I love when I can smell a neighbor burning wood, it's one of the best things in the world. And therein lies the reason why your wish isn't going to come to pass any time soon: we don't all agree that the thing you want to ban is bad.
Strange, I just hate it.. I'm fine with loud parties, your loud stupid music, don't care how you run your garden, but nothing is more hatable than someone harassing me with smoke or other headache creating smells, and going for my health. I go into kind of half nature, to enjoy the fresh air, and then there is someone making a fire out of some mix of pure laziness, ignorance, unnecessity and pyromania, despite it being also illegal here.
I mean a good campfire is hot, doesn't produce much smoke, goes quick up and high, usually not that smelly, ok who needs it.. (though we even these are quite toxic, so please a reasonable romantic evening campfire, and not a 5 hour bonfire on a hot and sunny day?)
But unfortunately it is always not just that, but I need to smell a lot of carcinogenic smoke, green waste smell, or even worse plastic or other garbage smell, my cloyhes stink, my furniture stinks.. and we are also just past the time to just burn stuff.
I got the largest electric one I could find. It's pretty good, entirely metal housing so it won't fall apart, and no gas or oil to deal with. I don't know if 120v vs 240v makes a difference in that regard for Americans who want more powerful electric gear, we're 240v.
It doesn't change the fact if you're in the US and you really want 240V you can (usually) get it. Just about everyone has 240V service at their home. And I think we should normalize offering 240V outlets in garages.
The PM2.5 not only gets in your lungs, it enters your bloodstream and gets everywhere including your brain. Peter Attia MD says there is no doubt it will shorten lifespan and healthspan.
>your wish isn't going to come to pass any time soon
It is coming to pass: for example, in the Bay Area, woodstoves and fireplaces have been banned in new construction since 2005.
Dude, the Bay area is quite possibly the most atypical culture you could ask for compared to the rest of the nation. That isn't exactly a compelling argument.
Back when vaping was still legal, a vaper surfaced on this site asserting that there was no way vaping would ever be banned, obviously, at least outdoors, e.g., while waiting for a bus, and guess what? At least where I live (Bay Area) vaping is illegal while standing outside waiting for a bus.
So don't assume that your appreciation of woodsmoke is widespread enough prevent its becoming illegal some day.
I didn't assume it. But for right now, enough people enjoy wood fires that you're not going to see it banned everywhere in the country any time soon. Obviously, it could happen some day. But I'm only making predictions about the near future (say the next 5-10 years), not for all eternity.
It actually doesn't stop mattering. I'm not unsympathetic to your point, but in a democratic form of government you do in fact need to get over the barrier of "other people like this and don't want to stop".
it's kinda fascinating, some of this ovens are older then 70 years, some where build in when this houses where build ~120 years ago (but update)
they also are all health hazards as in you manually have to control the exhausts when starting them and if you mess that up (e.g. fall asleep) CO will leak into you apartment and might silently kill you ....
Meanwhile Seattle is under a perpetual cloud of choking smoke for like 2 months out of every year because WA and Canada are incompetent when it comes to forest management, and the best people can do to pretend to care is tell you to rubber band a furnace filter to a box fan and wear N95 masks to work.
Banning wood stoves is like banning plastic bags. It's a superficial, empty gesture that is a drop in the bucket that makes no meaningful impact.
I'll continue to heat my cabin with wood, thank you.
Making general statements is superficial and empty. I live in a cold climate where wood and coal powered stoves are responsible for more than 90%+ of particulate pollution. The difference between warm and cold months is quite significant: around 20 µg/m³ daily average in the middle of summer vs 300-400 µg/m³ in the middle of winter. Maximum values are somewhere around 1000-1500 µg/m³, with short-term spikes up to more than 3000+ µg/m³ due to temperature inversions.
If we care about the climate and want to spend money on it, subsidizing cleaner tech for those countries that need it seems like a great way to start, because even if you don't believe in climate change you're still preventing poverty and unhealthy air for people.
I don't think it should be banned entirely though, that seems a bit extreme and likely to stir up controversy, even though it sure would be nice to have less smoke.
I don't quite get the appeal of indoor fires, most houses are so warm all winter I wouldn't want any more heat, but outdoor bonfires are a nice tradition, as long as they're not happening enough to kill people with fumes.
I live on a street of single family homes in Palo Alto and my next door neighbor smokes weed every day starting around 10am and it's totally legal for that stench to drift into my backyard shed and harass me where I'm trying to work.
Only if you live in urban areas where you don’t have to wait longer than 15 minutes for the bus to come, and, most importantly, where it is safe (especially for women) to take said bus late in the evening/at night. I hope that that recent and horrific stabbing in NYC made many people aware of the security aspect.
so if you life in any arbitrary urban area in most of the EU
because then you often don't even need to take the bus due to places you need to go to (e.g. super market) and places you come from (e.g. home) being much more intermixed/closer to each other
e.g. for me places to buy food, medicine, a doctor, dentist, fast food, train, bus, package station, kiosk, bakery, restaurant, cafe, a park like thing all in ~8min walking distance and I'm somewhat at the outer are of the city
still if you have disabilities and can't properly walk 8min you still need a car
I'm saying that, as a man, if you have to wait for your SO at the bus/train station late in the evening when she comes back from work then maybe public transport is not for everyone, in this case for almost 50% of the population (i.e. women). Been there, done that.
If you live in an European big city where this problem doesn't exist, where women have no problem and especially no fear to use public transport late in the evening all by themselves, then consider yourself (and your SO) lucky.
I'm not arguing that they don't work, but the "realistic" alternative is that people will still mostly use natural gas if they end up stopping wood-burning. Heat Pumps are also still using a mostly-fossil-fuel grid at times where there's the least solar and the grid is most carbon-intensive. Thus, wood burning is still the only carbon-neutral option. I'd still rather see heat pumps on a fully renewable grid, but we should have less carbon emissions getting there.
People struggle to change their behavior when confronted with data suggesting something they love is measurably worse for them
In my experience, we decide to just ignore the information and find other reasons to give higher weight to benefits, in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance without requiring a change of behavior
Add up enough of these cognitive dissonances and you find yourself living in a fantasy land where sugar is "fun!" and burning wood indoors is "cozy."
Actually, this article will deter me from using my fireplace this year. I enjoy chopping wood and then having somewhat-frequent fires in the winter. But my fireplace can also burn gas, which I will use now instead but far less frequently because it costs a shitload of money.
That’s great! Hopefully more people are inspired to do so and it starts a wave.
I know I’ve been advocating a long time since studies have been coming out for the last few decades on this.
I have three kids and have lived in multiple houses that we had to retrofit the chimney /fireplace because we didn’t use it and they are a huge heat sump.
Would be great to have reduced cancer across the population!
> Research shows that nearly 70 percent of chimney smoke reenters nearby buildings.
Which research ? Has this guy ever been in a village ? When 70% of "smoke reenters nearby buildings" than the chimney from one house gets to the door of the other.
Will be nice a little common sense before making such statements.
Scientifically this has been proven quite well, and people who aren't dumb notice as much - posh-er neighborhoods have terrible air quality in fall/winter evenings because they all fire up their cozy fireplaces. If you can smell it on the street... well, that's ground level. Open windows and ventilation inlets are higher up and more affected.
The thing is more that people don't want to hear it, like at all. These fireplaces are a big status symbol and considered totally green and environment-friendly because it's wood, right, so it's renewable, so has to be good. That they have no filters and terrible firing, resulting in exhaust that would make an 80s diesel tractor blush in shame, nobody cares. It's natural, so it's eco, so it's green, so it's good and it's cozy. So fuck off.
FWIW I think the eco intuition is not very durable. I can’t imagine people holding onto that when confronted, rather it’s just something people don’t consider without it being brought up.
But the coziness, positive emotional affiliation is definitely hard to overcome. Especially since it’s pretty much the smell and sound of bad burning itself that is so desirable.
> I can’t imagine people holding onto that when confronted
Try it sometime and be surprised! People round up a bunch of common retorts: the smoke goes up, it smells good, it’s an old tradition, thousands of years, etc.
People think that smoke isn’t that bad for you if it doesn’t make you cough, because it doesn’t feel bad in the lungs.
The fireplace delusion taught me a lot about myself and my own mind, and humans in general. We fucking LOVE to fool ourselves into rationalizing our own preferences.
No I am agreeing with you. I’m saying that the issue is not that they refuse to believe it’s bad when explained, it’s that even when they’re convinced it’s bad, they “net out” to keeping them due to all the positive affiliations despite believing the harms.
It's one of the most dismissive assertions I've seen on HN to date. The comment would have been much better without it, or simply rephrased as "To the point: ..."
> The inhalation of wood smoke, even at relatively low levels, alters pulmonary immune function, leading to a greater susceptibility to colds, flus, and other respiratory infections.
Well that put a damper on my desire to attend a bonfire later this month.
In my vacation house (where I went to live for one full winter season), I turned the fireplace into an enclosed (still wood-fueled) fireplace: there's a fan (if I want to) but it's not blowing smoke, it's blowing warmth from the warmed up "firebox" (whatever that is called) inside the house.
It's day and night compared to that same house back when it had a regular open fireplace: smoke would drift inside the house, no matter how cautious I'd be. And the efficiency was terribly bad.
Now I still get to enjoy the view and once the fire is well started and the smoke correctly goes through the chimney, I can even open the enclosed fireplace's for a while and hear the crackling / get the full ambiance.
Lovely. I hope to go there in december. Falling asleep in front of the fireplace is one of my greatest joy in life.
It did cost about 5 K EUR IIRC (to transform the open fireplace into an enclosed one) but then warming the house with wood is super cheap (an enclosed fireplace is much more energy efficient than an open fireplace).
FWIW I warmed the house during the entire summer with five "stères de bois" [1] (an old french unit that isn't used for anything anymore beside wood logs meant to be used as fuel), paid 60 EUR each. So 300 EUR to warm the house (south east of France, mild winter).
BTW: house in the middle of nowhere, hardly any neighbors. So they don't get my smoke and I don't get their.
I second this. My sister has an enclosed fireplace and last time I visited her, I measured the air quality next to it and was surprised to find no elevated PM2.5 inside the room.
However keeping the door just a bit open emitted a lot of smoke into the room and gave a completely picture.
So I would recommend measuring the air quality in your home if you run any fire place.
I should probably write a blog post about it sometime.
Yup I got a pm2.5 & AQI monitor a couple years ago and was so excited to have a fireplace in my new house, but trying it with the monitor showed me I really shouldn't. I am considering an enclosed fireplace to still be able to use it. I am now wondering if just emitting it into the air (out of the chimney) is acceptable.
EDIT: also it's been shocking to check on it while cooking, our vent hood is mediocre to bad so we end up keeping a door open most of the time we are cooking
Is this a modern wood stove or insert? I recently bought one for a new home we're building, and from my research they're incredibly efficient these days. Not installed yet so we will see, I suppose.
Great prospective study. If I'm reading correctly, using a wood-fired stove/fireplace for around a month per year for 10 years or more will increase your chance of lung cancer by ~70%.
To put that in perspective, smoking regularly in the same time-span increases your chance of lung cancer by over 20x.
From the evidence I've seen, intensity of smoke exposure is much more problematic than volume. Light smokers still have 5-10x the chance of developing lung cancer than a non-smoker.
That might be a good first estimate for smokers who only smoke one month out of the year.
What is the base rate? Increasing a very small number by 1.7x or 20x is still a small number. One might say “oh any increase is too much.” I acknowledge that and counter that there is opportunity cost to addressing topics of small effect. For example, I would expect that if unconstrained atmospheric combustion was a big problem, it would show up in occupations with high likelihood of exposure.
“Occupational exposure as a firefighter” has been evaluated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and classified as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”, with strongest evidence for testicular cancer, prostate cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
> using a wood-fired stove/fireplace for around a month per year for 10 years or more will increase your chance of lung cancer by ~70%
Really?! I just started using a wood fireplace, so this concerns me. I wish I understood things like "Cox regression" and other sciency things so I could trust this study.
I wouldn't worry too much. It's a very small chance you'll develop cancer from your fireplace. But it's increasingly apparent that there's no harmless dose for smoke inhalation.
You're conflating correlation with causation. Adding only a single factor under study (use of wood-burning fireplaces) will not necessarily produce the measured result; it could have been the result of a confluence of factors correlated with use of wood-burning stoves that you personally may lack.
Smoke is a highly likely casual factor. You don’t really win any points for saying IT COULD BE CORRELATION. This one seems like an extremely safe bet. It’s not even a huge effect size.
You've clearly not read the study at all or live in a world where only perfect double-blind studies are acceptable. I wish we could all live there but sometimes you have to make-do with reality.
I’m really grateful to the HN community for bringing quality research (like this study and others) to my attention.
If there are old habits and behaviors, like indoor fires in this case, that can be easily avoided (by me) in exchange for a better chance at avoiding lung cancer, I’m surely glad to have that knowledge so I can avoid unwitting cozying up to a serious ailment later in life.
There is so much anecdotal evidence around old habits but a high powered study, followed by more like it, can usually be relied upon.
In Norway it’s very normal to have a stove and burn wood pretty much every day in the winter season. Open fireplaces are rather uncommon though, essentially because they produce a lot of smoke and very little heat.
I hope they do a follow up study that separates fireplace and stove.
Properly operating a wood burning stove will release very little smoke. This is where the center stone is in the range of approx 300-600F (100-300C). The chimney will produce clear heat and there is no detectable smell when standing outside. Much different result than a fireplace.
It’s referred to as double combustion, or secondary combustion.
You often will not smell small particulate. In addition the problem here is that the stove has to be operated correctly and in good condition which, unfortunately, is not something you can rely on.
That is very interesting. Seems to be the case for all the nordic countries. Sweden stands out a bit more than Norway though, they actually have a higher lung cancer rate for women than for men.
I don’t remember the exact details, but the Oslo municipality has a program that will provide home owners a grant to replace their inefficient wood stoves.
Statistics Norway might have some interesting data on how many households burn wood.
The statistically significant cancer risk occurs when wood-burning occurs for more than 30 days a year. (Table 2).
Burning 1-29 days looks statistically insignificant unless I’m reading Table 2 wrong - HR of .88-1.12 with CIs including 1. Suggesting no statistically significant effect observed from incidental or short-term exposure…roasting chestnuts for Christmas in your fireplace seems a fairly safe bet for most.
As a point of public health calibration, women smokers are 13 times more likely to be a lung cancer victim than non-smokers, according to the American Lung Association.
“Men who smoke are 23 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Women are 13 times more likely, compared to never smokers.” 2004 US HHS Surgeon General report
Wood smoke use for more than 30 days/year is a ~50% increase in lung cancer, according to this one study. Maybe focusing on the order of magnitude greater causal agent would be the wiser public policy choice, in the US at any rate.
Presuming you've actually done this test, I think it must depend on your woodstove and how it is installed. We heat almost exclusively with wood, and have a modern EPA compliant wood stove connected to a continuous stainless steel liner that runs to the top of the chimney. We got an AQI meter based on comments on like this.
The AQI meter showed that there was no perceptible difference in air quality with the wood stove on versus off. Startup shows some smoke that decreases in an hour, but continuous operation shows no effect. Since we are in a cold climate, we burn essentially 24-7 for the entire winter, and thus startup effects can mostly be ignored.
You are right that there was a tremendous decrease in air quality when cooking, especially anything that was fried. So I agree that you might cut down on pancakes, but my evidence does not back your assertion you will "never use a woodstove again". To the contrary, using the meter tremendously reduced my worries about indoor air quality due to using the woodstove.
Did you actually do this test and find different results? What sort of system were you testing?
Yeah, comparing an old out of date stove/fireplace from peoples memory to modern high efficiency models seems rather disingenuous on the part of commenters.
Does the smoke magically disappear once it exists your chimney? Because your neighbors might get AQI results that aren't that great — or yours might deteriorate, too, if everybody around you starts heating with wood.
A modern wood stove doesn't emit much smoke at all. It recirculates smoke through the combustion chamber (and/or through a catalyst) which causes secondary combustion. This greatly increases the energy efficiency of the stove and gives you a much cleaner burn. Not only are you not polluting your house with wood smoke particles but you aren't polluting your neighbours either!
This. Mine has the recirculation thing with extra air channels and a big ol' soapstone wall interposed between the combustion chamber and the exhaust, and you can't just start it up full of wood, you have to fire it properly at which point it's hot enough to burn its own smoke, which you can see happening. And then once it's going, engage the catalyst, which also burns the smoke more, until there's basically nothing left.
No more 'nice cozy smell of neighborhood wood fires', but on every other possible metric, way way better.
In case he doesn't check this thread, and because my stove mostly matches his description, I'll mention that I'm happy with our Progress Hybrid by Woodstock Soapstone: https://www.woodstove.com/the-progress-hybrid-wood-stove
Looks good, thanks.
I'm somewhat constrained for space and room size, but might look for that or similar to replace the current one: https://www.agaliving.com/products/catalog/stoves/little-wen...
Stoves are useful in my area as there's a lot of wood around, often for free, though it does of course have to be dried.
I was responding to the specific claim that woodstoves cause measurable problems with indoor air quality in the houses where they are used. I'm willing to believe they can, but in my direct experience, mine didn't. I live in a rural enough area (less than 1 house per sq km) that my neighbors are unlikely to be affected by my woodburning, and I am not likely to be affected by theirs.
The question (and I agree it's open) is what effect dispersed burning has on the larger scale environment. My current belief is that local wood harvesting and burning in a modern efficient stove is better than the alternatives currently available to me. If you have evidence to the contrary, please provide it rather than just making blanket statements.
I still feel like there must be a difference in particulate matter from things like combustion products (which we know are very bad) and those from cooking - as long as nothing is getting hot enough to char and smoke… Still a good idea to have a good exhaust fan in your range hood (and pick induction over gas if possible) but still…
I grew up in a house that used wood as its primary means of heat (and two smoking parents but they smoked outside exclusively).
These days I live in a house primarily heated by a heat pump (in a region where it does get below 0F on a normal winter), but it has a wood stove.
I can't imagine a woodstove setup that doesn't leak some level of particulate to the inside. No matter what, you can tell there's wood burning inside. It is a pleasant smell (burning white/red oak), but probably not good for health.
So even though I grew up with a wood stove burning all winter every winter and have one now, I seriously appreciate the heat pump as a clean and efficient means of heat for 90% of the season.
To me, wood is a great emergency form of heat as we have plenty of deadfall where we live. But I would bot recommend it otherwise.
And don't get me started on firewood processing...
You’d be a fool to burn a fire in your home if your fireplace has no chimney. But that doesn’t mean all the smoke goes upwards.
Surprisingly I couldn’t find a single study which measured PM 2.5 from fireplaces with chimneys. However, a study on wood stoves (substantially better sealed) found a 30% rise.
Which is actually less than I would have predicted. I’d still expect a fire to be higher, but I’m open to being wrong. If I’m ever going someplace with a chimney and fire I’ll bring a pm 2.5 meter for fun.
Specifically until the chimney is hot enough. You can speed up the process though by using a fresh air intake for the stove rather than it using the air in the house.
Perhaps some of the smoke leaks out of the stove into the room.
Maybe a rocket mass heater[1] could help. It uses a thermal siphon to pull all the exhaust outside.
I mean wouldn’t you see it? I use my fireplace all the time in the winter and I would classify the amount of smoke that gets into the room as “negligible”. Especially compared to smoking a cigarette.Would love if this study actually followed up with some measurements and the “why” of actual fireplaces and stove setups.
You can measure. Buy an AQI meter. But I recommend buying an air filter with an AQI meter attached, as when you see what the supposedly negligible amount of smoke is actually doing to your air quality you are going to want the former.
Radon's most stable isotope has a half life of only a few day, so if there's radon in the wood there must also be uranium or thorium in the wood to create that radon, and that must have come from the soil. Not impossible I guess, but I think if trees in your area have that much uranium/thorium in them, your primary concern would be radon coming up through the ground into your house.
If there's a correlation between burning wood and radon related health issues, I suspect it's not because of radon coming from the wood but rather smoke from the wood making residents particularly susceptible to injury from radon coming up from the ground. Such an effect is known to exist with tobacco smoke at least.
I am no scientist but I know radon is bad, and it comes from underground.
Underground water can contain radon, and it is an issue when it comes to wells and houses. Trees can suck that radon and when you burn wood a radon meter shows an increase.
A tree could suck up water containing radon, but after you cut down the tree and let it dry under a shed for a few weeks that radon will be gone. It will have all decayed away because the half life is only 3.8 days. For firewood to still contain radon a few weeks after the tree was cut down, it must have a fairly substantial amount of uranium or thorium in it (constantly producing new radon.)
I run a wood stove all winter long and some years never turn on the central heat. I wonder how much of the extra risk is offset by
* lower fire risk from burning the fuel surrounding my house for the last few years.
* more exercise from cutting, splitting and hauling wood
* an air purifier running next to the wood stove all winter
* about ~$1,200 per year saved on fuel
* more open windows during the day during the winter due to cheaper fuel costs.
That might not fully compensate for the extra lung cancer risk but it might be significant.
Also since heat is cheaper this way, I heat my house more and am more comfortable all winter. This doesn't seem like it would offset the health risks, but it is a hedonic compensation.
So if I’m reading this right, for never smokers who lived in a house that used a woodstove between 1-29 days of the year have the same risk as smokers who used one everyday if the year?
1-29 days is… vague. However, the study also does not seem to consider the much, much tighter particulate emission rules that new wood stoves and similar have had to follow. The EPA has tightened it every few years (I think the last one was 2015?)
An old wood stove is almost nothing (and I literally mean almost nothing) to a modern wood stove in efficiency or air cleanliness. It would almost be like if you did a study about the toxicity of cars but used data from when we had leaded gas. There’s still a toxicity there but your results are going to be a mess.
Research on whether dual burning stoves that reprocess their own exhaust and don’t leak like old ones (the ones you’re referring to) or other systems could be done, but this is baseline research.
You can use the same logic to attack the choice of fuels, or species of wood, or types of seals and whether air is taken from the inside or the outside of the structure, and all of it would also be as valid as your argument. You could also try to invalidate this for only focusing on women. But, while valid arguments (as is yours), it sidesteps the purpose of the study.
It’s simply not the hypothesis of this particular study, which was simply establish a correlation between the presence & use of wood burning fuel in fire burning devices and lung cancer incidence in women.
It's still an important investigation because unfortunately things are never idiot proof. For example, my parents have a pellet stove and it was not uncommon for it to occasionally leak, followed by my parents putting in a shoddy self-made fix.
These kind of studies could indicate some flaw in the way we're creating wood stoves, or some consumer-related failure that needs to be better worked around. Or it could be that consumers are just using older wood stoves. But you gotta start with a baseline.
If you mean the summary in the abstract, they report three hazard ratios:
1. Women reporting more than 30 days of fireplace use per year (smokers and nonsmokers both included) had 68% more lung cancer than women reporting that their home didn't contain a fireplace (again, smokers and nonsmokers both included).
2. Non-smoking women reporting more than 30 days of fireplace use per year had 99% more lung cancer than non-smoking women reporting that their home didn't contain a fireplace.
3. Non-smoking women reporting 1-29 days of fireplace use per year had 64% more lung cancer than non-smoking women reporting that their home didn't contain a fireplace.
Not actually reported, but present by overwhelmingly strong implication:
1b. Women (without regard to ever-smoker status) reporting 1-29 days of fireplace use per year had no significant increase in lung cancer compared to women reporting that they didn't even have a fireplace. (Or else the results summary would have noted that they did.)
These are funny numbers with suspicious lacunae in the reporting of results. I'm not inclined to take them very seriously. At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that inhaling smoke is bad for you.
The study terminology always treats wood-burning stoves and fireplaces as equivalent. I would estimate that of the fixtures in the USA that are either wood-burning stoves or fireplaces, approximately 100% are fireplaces. This makes the study worthless if you want to draw conclusions about stoves, but OK for fireplaces. On the other hand, it doesn't really matter that the study won't let you draw conclusions about stoves, because there would be no point in having such conclusions.
High. I never used to notice. But after paying more attention to air quality in my environment, I now notice when air quality is particularly bad when before I hadn't. Sitting around a campfire feels like at least pack of cigarettes was smoked.
Yes, am wondering the same. Recently went camping and the fire was lit for effects as we cooked food on mini/portable stoves. It’s horrible I’d say, the smoke is thick, gets into everything but all I got is go with the program, it keeps the mosquitoes away and it’s charming. I wonder how long till this culture gets a reality check…
Does that seem unusual or alarming to you? Lots of fun and enjoyable things have tradeoffs that people willingly make. There' a balance to be struck between having fun in the moment and your long-term health, and most people tolerate a fair bit of risk in exchange for fun. Otherwise, nobody would drink alcohol, go skiing, etc.
No it doesn’t. I think my point was that people budget their carcinogenic exposure in non-optimal, hard to rationalize ways. Like living in places with terrible air quality (California) and then being concerned about gas stoves.
I understand that smoke is noxious, but I am still somewhat bewildered by the lack of corroborating historical data.
My own grandparents grew up in fairly modest rural settings, where burning wood was literally the only way not to freeze (I am talking about the 1930s here). At least one of their native villages was located in a tight valley where smoke tends to stay.
But lung disease wasn't that much of a problem among them and their neighbors. People typically died of heart attacks, strokes etc., or lived to be fairly old. (Two of my four grandparents made it to 90.)
I would expect a much more prominent data peak there. With other toxic substances, we often have it. With asbestos, even ancient Romans knew that slaves who mined asbestos died early of some weird lung disease etc.; the ancients lacked equipment, but were often good observers anyway.
I heat my house with a wood burning enclosed fireplace connected to an external air supply. Any other heating solution is kind of the less optimal choice when you own wood supply chain (forest and some tools to prepare wood for heating).
But yeah all those planet saving heat pumps need some advertising anyway.
Outdoor wood boiler. It keeps the wood mess and smoke outside. Plus you can either stack wood near it or use equipment to move it in bulk, rather than carrying wood inside by hand and re-stacking. They got a bad rap because of poor efficiency (the first generation was essentially a barrel inside a barrel) and people's tendency to burn trash in them, but newer models are two stage gasifiers just like modern wood stoves.
Although honestly I kind of still want a heat pump for the shoulder seasons and the times I'm away.
I recently did a deep dive into woodsmoke as I couldn't understand how ~2 million years of evolution with woodsmoke hadn't rendered us completely immune to its effects.
I couldn't at that time find a paper that showed that it was very harmful to humans, just a lot proving that it was harmful to mice, rats, rabbits, and guinea pigs (and a lot of forwards stating the dangers then linking to another animal research paper)—which bothered me—rodents don't have ~2 millions years of woodsmoke in their evolution history. I found papers about forest fires that some showed bad effects other were inconclusive and wouldn't;t draw conclusions as there were too much smoke from other combustable substances mixed into the smoke. I also found a paper about firefighters exposed to woodsmoke that found no ill effects on them.
So I remained unconvinced.
But this paper is different: not animals, large study, evidence. SO I will read it in-depth.
But I am still baffled. How could over a million years of evolution not have bred this out of us? I'm genuinely curious.
Why should you expect ~2 million years of evolution to bread that out of us?
The ability to start and control fires for warmth and cooking purposes greatly increases the odds of survival for individuals and their offspring.
If I may personify evolution as form of rhetoric: evolution doesn’t care if you limp along through a painful life, or if your genes guarantee a horrific death at the end of it. Evolution only cares about your ability to produce offspring that in turn reach maturity and produce offspring of their own, and so on.
Resources are finite in this world, so sure, the fittest tend to outcompete less fit creatures, and the former will perpetuate its genes while the latter won’t. This is where the notion of “survival of the fittest comes from”. But it is a mistake to interpret that implication the other way around: that is, survival does not necessarily imply greater and greater fitness over time.
Evolution isn’t about species becoming the best they could be, it’s only about being good enough.
>I couldn't understand how ~2 million years of evolution with woodsmoke hadn't rendered us completely immune
There's strong evidence for use of fire going back only .5 million years. More importantly, all existing humans are descended from a population that lived in sub-Saharan Africa till 70,000–50,000 years ago:
Although that population probably used fire before migrating out of Africa, they probably did so only for cooking and to keep wild animals away and almost never used fire indoors.
Modern humans didn't invent cooking or discover the use of fire, an earlier Homonid did, probably Homo Erectus.
If we're going to trade Wikipedia articles, the one on control of fire by early humans starts: "Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 1.7 to 2.0 million years ago".
For evolution to happen a trait needs to effect reproductive success. Diseases that hit later in life will only have a minimal effect. Your kids are already grown by the time you get cancer and probably having children of their own. There may be slightly less resources available to raise the next generation if you die but the effect is minimal. Genes that help/hurt the survival of young people are going to have a much a more profound effect and influence evolution more.
Most of the people have been living close to nature up to like a 100 years ago. And today? I have like 8 allergies, and I have no idea about the root cause of 6 of them. I would die in 2 days on a field of random weed, by sneezing myself to death. And I suspect I am far from the record holder in this site.
Burn wood for many years and couldn't care less about these studies. If you're burning dry wood with a clean chimney and insure your seals are good, you're fine. There has been renewed interest by climate warriors to ban wood stoves (they love to cite women and children being "most at risk", the emotional argument must be present to change hearts and minds). Ironic, given it's mostly poor and working class people burning wood. Must be a big push by heat pump and geothermal industries to get rid of wood stoves in the name of "public health". Despite urban populations living with AQI magnitudes higher than rural populations who use these heating sources.
The "science" has no mentions of the stove itself, the wood used, how the wood was dried, the physical setup where the stove is being used, they also lumped in "fireplaces" which imo, negates the entire study, because those are open to the air. I'm not about to throw away 500k+ years of human history of burning wood because a few graduate students produced a paper.
Good points. I do think economical geothermal AC shouldn't be too difficult in many places, but money has a way of influencing things; look at the septic industry horror stories. I'm curious about how urban vs rural AQIs look for different areas. It does seem more and more like climate control is used to control people through moral and consequently legal claims, and some whistleblowers seem to support that idea. Any skepticism is labeled "conspiracy theory".
Also mentioned here, modern double and triple burning stoves are much more efficient, and catalytic combustor stoves leave almost nothing but CO2 and water vapor coming out of the flue pipe. At least for stoves and enclosed fireplaces, if temporary smoke from an initial burn is still a concern, then I'm sure a separate pipe with a fan could be set up to draw air through the flue until a thermometer reaches a certain temperature. A fresh air intake should eliminate smoke leakage during startup. A strong flame used to start the fire, and a draft can also reduce the total smoke produced during this process. Alternative formats like rocket mass heaters may help with this as well.
Rather than draw attention to a real danger, encourage education, and distribution of better technology to help people burn a renewable resource safely, some would rather ban a medium that supports the survival of the poor completely. And some here would condemn all wood burners as ignorant archaic people who poison everyone around them and are too unintelligent to realize it. Sam Harris's post, (https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion) also has this air of incredulity that anyone would burn wood since science shows that it produces harmful byproducts. He seems to fail to realize that wood can burn cleanly, and suggests that we burn gas, which we know also often produces harmful levels of benzene; he suggests that we burn nothing at all, while even the electricity we use comes from coal burning, and alternative "green power" still has a large carbon footprint at this point, no? Geothermal seems good, and avoids radon issues, but is a specialized wood-burning system better if geothermal won't be enough? How do we move forward knowing that industry often influences studies? He writes, "The unhappy truth about burning wood has been scientifically established to a moral certainty". This is yet another "scientist" saying, "The science is settled." Unfortunately for him and climate alarmists, no it hasn't been, and posturing himself as correct because he believes in "scientific rationality" while simultaneously missing simple solutions to simple problems seems typical for him. That said, I do think sharing this info with communities who burn wood inefficiently is a good idea, and I see why their arguments about tradition and it being natural are criticized. He seems to see no exception to this "traditional" attitude among those who burn wood. If these communities don't care about inefficient burning, and aren't regulated, move away; stay mobile. Alternatively, perhaps using an air filter with a high MERV rating helps.
Why ban a viable, renewable heat source that can be used to teach people valuable lessons? So that they can become dependent on wind turbines, such as the ones that froze in Texas a year or two ago, leading to the deaths of many who were wholly dependent on electric heat? I'd rather breath some smoke than freeze to death anyway; banning wood burning is worse than imposing regulations to make it almost completely safe, and seeing conclusive opinions before people consider alternative burning systems concerns me, especially when the alternatives posed are often just as dangerous. The most important thing is educating people though. When they know why a safety regulation exists, they're much less likely to hate it and disobey it, as long as it doesn't restrict alternatives and freedoms that it shouldn't.
This is the last thing I expected to read on the wood burning debate, an arrogant piece for everyone's favorite atheist. I'm sure he doesn't need to think about heating cost in his condo in Hollywood.
Wood is already known to be cancer causing (via inhaled sawdust). Smoke is not going to be any better, and the quantity of microplastics trees available won't really move the needle on that.
Can you give me some studies on that, assuming that the sawdust is from straight wood and not any form of wood beam which contains glues and treatments?
"The strongest association of exposure to wood dust and development of nasal cancer is observed in those occupations where workers are exposed to hard wood dust and chemical additives are not used."
Note that the strongest association is when chemicals are NOT used - I suspect this might be more due to how people work the wood (less likely to sand particles board, more likely to wear protective gear) than the nature of the chemicals themselves.
It does go on to say that various respiratory cancers are from both untreated and treated wood sawdust, but wood alone is well known to cause cancer.
Definitely possible IMO! Seems like it would be surprising tho - consider the disparities in volume. I think the boring answer is that breathing smoke is dangerous, despite the occult and ambience benefits of a hearth ;(
it forms minute bits of plastic that are tinier than 5 millimeters long. Their size means they end up everywhere, even in our blood, where they range in size between 700 nanometers and 5,000 nanometers.
Information like this--the link and the discussion--is why I love HN.
Unlike others, though, with posts like this, I'm thinking about wood stove use and burn piles in my part of rural America. What does the Census data say about the use of central heat? What is the health of those who live around me and rely on wood stoves? What can be done locally to transition folks off of wood stove use? What positive health impacts will we see? What can be done via public education to reduce the installation of fireplaces in new homes?
the ways you can (short term) kill yourself by doing indoor wood (or pallet) burning wrong are quite many and even in countries which relative strict regulations when it comes to chimes and similar deaths by it aren't that rare
if something can kill you just because you used it somewhat wrong it it's somewhat broken in some aspect of ventilation you probably should assume that even a more correct long term usage might have a good chance to have serve long term negative health effects
It’s amazing to me that active air exchanges for filtering and even humidity are not well optimized as part of modern housing HVAC. Is it costs or simply system integrations?
For instance, another big indoor pollutant is cooking fumes, from both the heat source and to cook, carmelize, burn, etc - the food and vapors of changing temperatures. The range hood required by fire codes to stove sizes is not turning on automatically with pollutant detection.
I'm aware of this project: https://www.noeton.fi/ They have a device that goes into your fireplace removes cancer causing substances to EU standards. They are a group of Finnish scientists and friends who wanted to find a way to make something they love less polluting and safer to use.
In the UK recently, there has been a designation of 'smoke-free' areas, specifically as a result of research done on the harm to health caused by PM2.5 particulates. It's become quite popular for middle-class homes to fit multifuel stoves (i.e., wood, coal, whatever) in order to heat the main room of their house. Largely because they look nice but there is some argument to be made that with the cost of living increasing, especially around energy, that it is somewhat economical to do so - particularly if you have access to free/foraged wood. The idea is you can still use these stoves so long as the fuel you are burning is considered 'smokeless', which in reality isn't actually smokeless but refers to wood that has a moisture content between 15-20%, as well as a number of commercially-available fuels you can buy from large hardware stores like B&Q and some supermarkets.
Another development that personally affects me is that local councils are now able to start enforcing this 'smoke-free' thing on owners of narrowboats[1]. For those that don't know, the UK has a 2000 mile network of inland canals on which thousands of us live, in canal barges of about 7ft beam. In the winter, a lot of these boats' primary method of heating our homes is using multifuel stoves. It's an itinerant lifestyle that can be hard at times but incredibly freeing and requires one to live somewhat more in tune with the seasons. A lot of boaters don't have a ton of money and primarily fuel our stoves with foraged wood at varying levels of seasoning (the process of drying wood to reduce moisture content and make it burn better and cleaner). For instance, this year I got a knock on the roof of my boat by a tree surgeon, informing me we needed to move our boat as they had to chop down an ash tree that had succumbed to ash dieback [2]. I asked if I could take some of the wood and he said no problem, saves them a bit of work getting rid of it. And that's now my wood for the winter. We are, of course, aware of the health hazards of groups of boats burning not the best wood, but a large percentage of live-aboard boaters really don't have any other option.
Sorry, not particularly relevant to the article posted but I thought it worth mentioning that there are cases where not burning things to stay warm in winter is not an option for some groups of people.
There should be no smoke coming out from a modern stove or fireplace. They are enclosed, take air mostly from outside and blow their exhaust into the sky.
Of course some smoke can come inside from the windows or aeration holes.
https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion
> Once they have exited your chimney, the toxic gases (e.g. benzene) and particles that make up smoke freely pass back into your home and into the homes of others. (Research shows that nearly 70 percent of chimney smoke reenters nearby buildings.) Children who live in homes with active fireplaces or woodstoves, or in areas where wood burning is common, suffer a higher incidence of asthma, cough, bronchitis, nocturnal awakening, and compromised lung function. Among adults, wood burning is associated with more-frequent emergency room visits and hospital admissions for respiratory illness, along with increased mortality from heart attacks. The inhalation of wood smoke, even at relatively low levels, alters pulmonary immune function, leading to a greater susceptibility to colds, flus, and other respiratory infections. All these effects are borne disproportionately by children and the elderly.