Joke’s on you, off-the-gridders;
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new standards for wood stoves that would reduce the maximum amount of fine particulate emissions allowed for new stoves sold in 2015 and 2019. Maximum emissions would be reduced by one-third next year and by 80 percent in five years…
Related: The Cleantech crash
First they came for my V8 car.
Then they came after my perfectly good light bulbs.
Now they are after my wood stove.
What next, regulate my CO2 infused breath?
“When these standards are fully implemented, EPA estimates that for every dollar spent to comply with these standards, the American public will see between $118 and $267 in health benefits,”
Interesting.
Seems to me the EPA believes in ‘trickledown’ health benefits, yet Leftists deny the ‘trickledown’ concept when it comes to tax relief.
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2014/01/07/the-trickledown-lie-n1772687/page/full
They could make the stoves really enviro-friendly with compulsory conversion to natural gas.
It would be even more environmentally friendly if they came up with a way to to convert the heating appliance to use solar energy. Of course, that means finding a way to store the solar energy to convert it to heat when the sun isn’t shining, like at night, or when it shines weakly, as in winter. Ideally the storage medium should be produced by some sort of natural process. Surely if the government “invests” enough in research they can come up with such a technology, and think of the jobs that will be created in the process.
Tooner that would be a far too wooden approach.
But you are right, any day now some bureaucrat will reinvent the tree.
City Council proposed banning wood stoves, until it was pointed out, unless they can guarantee electrical service, they would be considered a heat source in any long power outage at 40 below.
City just had a 2hour outage at -45C, all kinds of waterline freeze up, extreme discomfort for some.
Emission regulations for wood burning is stunned, the variability of the fuel ensures any standards are nonsense, another empty regulation to club the taxpayer with.
So the people in the USA will buy their woodstove this year or make their own once the regulations come into effect. Steel plate, angle iron, welding rod and fire brick are cheap, plentiful and unregulated. My late uncle built one out of two oil drums, using the second as a heat exchanger, that heated his large house for years.
What they don’t explain is that with ObamaCare(TM):
$118 = A Band-Aid
$267 = Two aspirin
Another consequence of trying to legislate common sense. I remember that in the mid 1950’s, Vancouver in winter was always under a pall of blue smoke. Many homes were heated by sawdust-fired gravity furnaces, including the one my parents owned. Warm and cozy, and silent, but they made smoke alright. And there was an entire small room in the basement, maybe 8X8 feet, for a sawdust bin, and every couple of weeks, two Sikhs with a 3-ton truck would trundle up the lane, and blow the bin full of sawdust through a six-inch flexible metal pipe, which was stowed coiled on the back of the truck body. As a little kid, I was fascinated by the process, and I would catch sh*t if I played in the sawdust bin, because it allegedly harbored fleas (but mostly because I’d track the stuff through the house).
But, no doubt about it, the air quality in Vancouver was bad. As oil burners replaced the sawdust, and then natural gas replaced the oil burners, air quality improved markedly.
Drive through some small towns in B.C. on a still winter day, and the smell of wood smoke is strongly present. Now, I enjoy the aroma, but I also know that too much wood smoke is indeed unhealthy.
Common sense tells us that using wood as a primary source of heat is stupid in a big city, because not only does it contribute to air pollution, but the damned stuff has to be hauled in from the hinterlands at some expense. And it’s easy to get natural gas in a big city, so what is the point? Wood fireplace, or a small wood heater for occasional use? Have at it, no big deal.
On the other hand, in a small town, or deep rural, wood is an excellent choice for primary heat. It’s readily available on site, or nearby, and population density is low enough that normal air circulation makes the air pollution a non-issue, although there may be some localities, like towns in deep valleys, with special issues. Point is, it should be decided locally whether or not it’s wise to heat with wood, not 3000 miles away.
One final thought: catalytic wood stoves, or stoves that reburn their smoke, should theoretically be more more efficient than old-fashioned stoves, and if were ever going to install wood heat as my primary heat source, I’d certainly look at them for that reason alone. No point in sending unburned fuel up the chimney. Reduced risk of chimney fires is another benefit.
Since I live in a part of Alberta with few trees, and none of my own to cut “free”, wood heat makes zero sense for me, but I may well be switching to coal soon. Keeping the gas as backup, of course.
Soooo…open fires on some patio stones in the living room it is, then.
Steel plate, angle iron, welding rod and fire brick are cheap, plentiful and not yet regulated.
gordinkneehill can you explain how you plan to switch to coal, if you were to do that?
Here in BC we are being killed with electricity prices, and in my case no natural gas where I live only electricity. The BC Utilities Commission (yet another green propaganda organization) has forced a two-tier rate which makes the situation even worse.
So I was thinking of going to wood using the latest and greatest technology available. My heating bill in the winter would be 1/3 of what it is now, and that’s at the *current* electricity rates, let alone where the stupid Liberals plan to take rates soon.
But coal? Sounds interesting. Can you shed some light on this?
Of course they will! Once a government regulates your CO2 it literally has the power of life and death over you.
I suppose people could use cleaned-out cut-up oil barrels as stoves. Very environmentally friendly!
Natural gas is fine, except that the controls are dependent upon electricity so if there is a power outage you will likely freeze with the rest of the populace.
mid island mike
This is just another battle in Obama’s war on affordable energy. New wood stoves are already amazingly efficient,but they will keep raising the bar until stoves no longer work or we can no longer afford them.
BC, in the farmhouse in the ’70s we had a turn of the century Findlay Condor wood stove that could burn either wood or coal, the only difference was the grates below the firebox which could be switched out in minutes when the stove was cool. During the later Victorian era and into the ’40s coal was the preferred fuel. It was cheaper, required less space than wood, didn’t cause chimney fires, required no complicated furnaces etc.
Find an old pot bellied stove and you’re in business if you have a source for coal. The advantage of coal over wood is you could buy a dump truck load now and a hundred years from now it would still be good where wood will have rotted. Just remember that coal is harder to start but burns a lot hotter than wood so easy does it the first few times you stoke the fire.
‘Natural gas is fine, except that the controls are dependent upon electricity so if there is a power outage you will likely freeze with the rest of the populace.
mid island mike”
The controls are electric, but the needed power is so low that they are usually powered by a heat transfer at the pilot flame, not outside electrical power.
Mike, I have a Napoleon gas stove, it requires no electricity to run. The thermostat is battery operated, but you can also manually adjust the flame if the batteries are dead. Electricity is needed to run the optional fan only. I chose this propane furnace over oil just in case there was another ice storm. Google napoleonfireplaces and see for yourself.
Catalytic stoves are all very well, but they present other risks because if the converter fails to work properly, you end up with huge deposits of creosote. My mother paid a pile of money for a high-end catalytic fireplace and ended up with a chimney completely blocked with clinkers. She was lucky she only got smoked out of the house, instead of burned out. I can’t believe that tar and creosote are any better for the environment than carbon particles, either.
I’m not saying the technology doesn’t work – just that it may not work as well as you might think. This is especially true in very cold environments.
BC, quite a few rural folks in Alberta still heat with coal, and its cheap. Alberta law requires that coal mines sell to consumers at the same price as the power plant pays, so all one has to do is show up at the mine with a truck, get weighed, get loaded, get weighed out, and pay for it. I’m sure you could find a contract hauler if you lack one of your own.
Typical deal is you have an outside “boiler” (in quotes, because the water side runs at atmospheric pressure, so it’s technically NOT a boiler), with an automatic stoker (old, old tech, now). Stoker will have a small bin at the feed end, and most folks now have an auger arranged to feed coal to it from a hopper-bottomed bin. Such a setup, once well-tuned can run for up to two weeks without attention.
One farmer I know near me, told me a few years ago, that heated his house, and a barn, and a large shop for $600 per season. On gas, I may pay $200 per month to heat a house and a 2-car garage, both insulated fairly well.
I am aiming to buy a coal system from the widow of a good friend who passed away this last fall. She had the coal burner shut down, and the gas restarted because she didn’t want the hassle of cleaning the grates, and going to fetch coal in a truck, which her late husband did with gusto.
A correctly designed woodstove does not need a catalytic convertor to burn clean. The Pacific Energy Summit, made in Duncan BC is designed to introduce secondary combustion air through the baffle above the fire. It gasifies the wood then burns the wood gas. Very efficient, virtually no creosote deposits.
http://www.pacificenergy.net/technologies/wood/baffle
http://www.pacificenergy.net/products/wood/stoves/summit/
Point taken. I suspect that you to be very careful to operate such stoves only within their best performance range. In any case, for me, burning wood is not a realistic option, because I would have either a)buy it, and firewood is not cheap, or b)drive nearly 100 miles to some place in the Forestry Reserve where I could get a cut permit, and spend several weekends each year cutting, hauling, and splitting and stacking it, so I could get “free” (heh) wood.
Now if I lived right on an owned wooded quarter, sure I’d burn wood. Horses for courses.
Christopher, I wonder if she’s using ‘green’ or unseasoned wood, or not burning the wood fully(hot enough?) or is burning other things in the fireplace which is a big no-no.
Once you start a fire you need it to burn hot and completely to burn off the particles from the ‘fire bricks’ or ‘lava rocks’ as we call them, otherwise yep they’ll clog up.
We have a Pacific Energy wood stove now and it’s 10x better than the old clunker that was there before. Chimney Sweep guy always lets us know what his finding are each year, and he says, “you’re doing it right” no creosote, just some dusty powder.
It wasn’t the fuel, just the converter – didn’t perform well and combustion tended to cool down over time, so you had to keep fiddling with the vent to keep the fire hot enough.
I remember 20 or 30 years ago when my old man lived on Vancouver Island.
Every second vehicle had a bumper sticker, Split wood, not atoms. ☺
Whatever.
Let us see now,
There is no one to tell the useless, looking for something to do bureaucrats, to stop it.
If you go to the political meetings have a say and say to them to bloody stop it. I do.
You see, they, the bureaucrats, have to show some activity, otherwise they have no job, so they go on and on creating bullshit. The politicians just nod and bullshit happens.
Regulating wood stoves is government gone amok. Anyone who heats with a wood stove is interested in the following items:
(1) How to ensure that the majority of the heat stays in the space heated rather than going up the chimney
(2) Having a stove which minimizes chimney cleaning (and hence is at a lower risk of causing chimney fires)
(3)Burns efficiently so one doesn’t have a large amount of charcoal left in the stove after a fire.
The current stove that I have in my shop satisfies all of the above criteria and, now that I’m burning fir, minimal ash after a fire. It would take a bit of work to ensure that I get more heat from this stove, but then it does a damn good job of heating a 256 ft^2 shop and often have to open the windows in order to reduce the temperature. This is a Norwegian made stove that I’ve been exceedingly happy with.
What I can’t understand is why “natural” forest fires are exempt from none of the EPA restrictions and, in S. Central BC, my burning wood reduces the risk of forest fires.
I’ve now got enough wood to last me through this season even in the case of using the stove 24 hours/day in the event that power was down and the natural gas pressure dropped to 0. Just drove by a lumbar yard a couple of days ago where they had “free firewood” advertised and lots of places where one can pick up fuel as having someone like me take all of the scrap wood is an economic benefit to a company that would otherwise have to pay a per/pound disposal fee to dump the wood.
We have lots of dead trees where I live and hence a significant fraction of the population in rural areas heat with wood. I like the smell of wood burning stoves and given the number of people in my area who have either wood burning fireplaces or stoves, it’s not accompanied by much particulate chimney emmissions. As far as burning wood in either fireplaces or stoves in large cities, this would likely get one noticed and anonymity for survivalists is a must in such situations. In Vancouver, a single deisel powered truck would produce far more particulate emissions than a new wood fired stove. I don’t particularly care what people do in Vancouver and, given the very limited storage space that the small lots have there, having a large stash of firewood like I currently do is not an option. My advice to those people who like wood stoves is to move out of the moonbat capital of Canada.
As others have noted, it’s very easy to build ones own wood stove. I have one such iten which was pulled out of my workshop to be replaced by a smaller, but much more efficient model. The stove that is my spare is clearly a home-built unit that may have been fine in its day but looking at the design tells me that my current wood stove leaves a lot more heat within my shop than the previous home built model. Also, my current wood stove allows for cooking on its surface which is an important survivalist option.
As far as natural gas goes, it was my understanding that the gas companies had their own generator to ensure that they could still pump gas during power outages. One survivalist option would be to invest in a large propane tank and have that kick in when both the power failed and natural gas pressure from the network hit 0. Don’t know what stupid regulations pertain to having a large propane tank on ones property are where I live, but I’ve always got the “You live in a very underdoctored area and if you piss me off enough, there will be one fewer doctor in your town” argument.
One problem with home-made wood stoves…..certification.
Insurance companies and fire departments demand a CSA sticker.
Been there.
If you build it, and use it…they will come.