pwa wrote: ↑15 Sep 2022, 4:47am
Biospace wrote: ↑14 Sep 2022, 10:12pm
.........It'll be the fashionable sorts who love their open fireplaces and designer stoves who'll wreck it for the rest of us as they suck their already warm air up and out of the chimney.
I grew up, in the 1960s, in a world where burning coal and (later) oil in a domestic situation was the norm, and every house in our street, and every street in our town, had smoke coming from chimneys. Every town in the UK was smokey, and the power stations and trains and the factories and the schools were smokey. Ditto across Europe. But you think the damage to the albedo of the north is worse now than then? And the cause is the humble wood burning stove that we fire up for a couple of hours in the evening for four months of the year?
As recently as the 1970s, climate scientists were sure we were reaching the end of our current interglacial period, that snow and ice would return to our latitudes for many months of the year. By the 1980s, things were changing and the idea that 'man-made' CO2 was driving our climate became entrenched by the 90s. The concentration on CO2 was so great that we promoted smokey technology no matter how marginal the benefits were to CO2 levels - diesel engine in cars, woodstoves etc.
The warming of the Arctic at a rate at least double that of the rest of the planet has prompted a lot more research since the mid 2000s and so the importance of CB particles has been highlighted. Because we weren't measuring this in the 50s or 60s, it's not possible to say whether this was worse then than now, because of Europe.
However, our consumption was a lot lower and there were less than half the number of people living on the planet. Air pollution was far more visible than now and since it's known larger particulates are less likely to remain airborne for as long, it's plausible to suggest today's tiny particulates are more likely to end up further from source. But, Scandinavian lakes and forests were killed by tall chimneys spewing pollution in the UK and other northern European nations. The world's systems are very good at widespread distribution of particulates, something we've used to try to keep our local air less polluted, something ice core scientists use to look into the past.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... -coal-mine
pwa wrote: ↑15 Sep 2022, 4:47am
That isn't quite what a well designed wood burner does. It takes its air from a spot very close to the floor (or ours does), the coolest air in the room and the combustion happens in an enclosed box (not an "open fire") when the air has been pre-heated to enable secondary combustion that reduces soot production. There are very crude wood burners with simple air inlets, usually on the front, but I think they are being phased out because they are relatively dirty. Dirtiest of all, and by a big margin, is an open fire, where most of the heat is wasted.
To clarify - by 'already warm', I'm talking about internal air which is already heated by other means. Too often I've been in houses with warm radiators and air around 20C with a flaming wood stove merrily pulling this air out of the house. Wood burners have become very fashionable in recent years, what was once largely the preserve of rural cottages burning material dragged from local woods is now widespread throughout suburbia having been marketed as something good for the environment, as were diesel cars.
Unless a stove air intake is sealed and piped to the outside, it draws air from the space it's in. This air is then replaced with air from outside through air leaks and/or vents. I have seen cases where the overall effect is a cooling one, silently dealt with by the CH thermostats doing their job
Central heating primarily warms a house's air, the misnamed 'radiators' are really convectors. An open fire or stove warms you more with its radiation than with the warmer air it creates - typically, air temperatures can be 2 or 3C lower than with radiators or UFH for similar, though different, levels of comfort. Combining the two creates problems, unless intake air is piped from outside and the thermostats are turned down to low levels.
With road miles and sometimes even fossil fuel drying involved in domestic wood supplies, it does begin to look highly questionable to have a gas or oil boiler flue and a flue from a woodstove poisoning our air. There are days in alpine valleys where children are not allowed to play outside in school playtimes because of the dangerous levels of airborne toxins from wood burning.
https://woodsmokepollution.org/?ref=seoraporu.co
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39115829
Lighting a fire from on top rather than underneath has a beneficial effect on emissions, using smaller pieces of wood and recharging progressively similarly.
but not something that has ever trouble me or my derrière...