The Heat facing Outdoor Wood Furnaces and Boilers
By Kenneth Barbalace
[Friday, February 24, 2006]
Emissions from outdoor wood burning stoves drift across property lines raising health concerns for neighbors who inadvertently breathe the smoke filled air. The Heat facing Outdoor Wood Furnaces and Boilers
12 comments:
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Outside wood boilers are a great way to heat your house. They do create a lot of smoke when they first start up, but they don't burn your house down and where wood is plentiful, it beats giving half your pay to the gas company in the winter time. Pollution needs to be addressed by making these stoves cleaner burning and more efficient rather than legislating them off the market. A million of them don't make as much smoke as one California brush fire. How about the government spending some money on improving this renewable energy heat, rather than banning it. Makes more sense than bombing Iraq.
Isn't just like everything nowadays. Someone says "oh I don't think we should do that anymore" and before you know it some jerk legislates against it. I totally agree, make the stoves more efficient and cleaner.
http://www.outdoor-heating-guide.com/
What do you suggest in the mean time for a neighbor who lives less than a 100 feet from the smoke source? When someone comes in my house they smell like they were just at a campfire! How can I get them to change the way the smoke affects my family?
Quoting the article, "The OWB removes the risk of fire and indoor pollution by taking the heat source outside."
Who invented this statement? The truth is exactly opposite.
A properly installed and maintained indoor wood heating system (which is very easy to do) produces NO indoor air pollution and NO fire hazard (except from improper ash storage).
The indoor air quality in houses near OWBs is poor due to the poor air quality outside the house. Have you ever witnessed a creosote covered OWB go up in flames? You don't want to have anything within 100'.
The technology to make 80%+ efficiency low particulate clean burning boilers has existed and units have been available to the public for about 30 years. I won't advertise companies, but you can find them easily. Hint: You won't hit high efficiency with a water jacket around the combustion chamber.
My neighbor has an OWB approximately 300 feet from my house. Perhaps because if the wind pattern in our neighborhood, or because of the location of his stove, we get smoke in large amounts at least 4 to 5 days out of the week. My yard for some reason seems to be a smoke magnet. In the spring and fall I cannot leave windows open because invariably I will get a smoke filled house. I put my dog out only to have her come back into the house with smoke scented fur. On a nice day I would like to take my morning coffee out into the yard and enjoy nature… I can almost count on being driven back into the house because of the smoke smell, sometimes so strong that it burns my eyes and my lungs. In mid winter with my house all closed up I can still often smell smoke inside my house. Even when it is only mildly smoky I am concerned about the health hazards I may encounter. I have breathing problems, get headaches and have concern because of my husband’s heart problems. For those of you who believe wood smoke is harmless, I urge you to do some research. As far as I am concerned, shame on you to those of you who are basking in the warmth of the big bucks you are saving by using OWBs at the expense of those who live near you. Unless you haven’t got a neighbor within a mile of you, you still might be affecting the health, happiness and comfort of your neighbor. And that, my dear friends, is pure greed. You can blame legislators if you wish, but in the end it is the responsibility of owners and manufacturers of OWBs to control the smoke their systems emit.
In regards to the last comment about owners of OWB not having respect for neighbors; I have to concur. We all owe it to our neighbors to have some respect for their air. It is unconscionable to use an OWB if the smoke is going to have any kind of negative impact on downwind neighbors. They have as much right to clean air as you do and you do not have the right to put their health/wellbeing at risk just so you can save a few dollars on heating costs.
If you can not mitigate and eliminate the negative impacts on your downwind neighbors, then you have a social obligation not to use an OWB.
The following comment was just posted, but not directly approved because of some what seemed to be self-promotion links. I'm using the blockquote in this post to allow the comment sans the self-promotion:
--begin quoted comment--
I must greatly disagree that ALL who own a outdoor furnace are disrespectful to their neighbours.
If a person who knows a outdoor furnace follows the HPBA guide lines setup by the HPBA http://www.hpba.org/index.php?id=154
there should and would be no problems.
Three of my neighbours own a Crown Royal Stove (URL Removed) both up wind and down wind, one uses hers to heat the greenhouses and one is within 250 feet of my home. I have NEVER had a problem with smoke outside or in the yard, and I'm not afraid of my children playing out there because of it.
Seriously... I know for a fact that Northland Distributing (URL Removed) has a copy of the HPBA's Burn Best information in with their manual. I swear that makes all the difference, and this why the EPA is getting involved. http://www.epa.gov/woodheaters/partners.htm
So maybe before you jump to the fact that outdoor furnaces are all bad, maybe you might want to talk to your neighbour about burning at higher temperatures and for longer periods, this will eliminate smoke production, and ask them to put on a tall enough chimney. Maybe it's just your neighbour being uneducated about the situation which YOU, and no one else, have the responsibility to do. Talk to them and ask them if they can help you live more comfortably as they live comfortably. Which is the American and Canadian way.
--end quoted comment--
Nobody has said that ALL outdoor wood boilers are bad. What has been said time and time again in comments is that there are instances where they are inappropriate or need to be appropriately installed.
owb dont kill plant or wildlife i
have an owb 165 ft from neighbor have green healthy plants stove is
close to them.black bears deer turkeys. people have come to my home and never even thought my owb
was on. well its was. i have one of
those annoying neighbors who constantly complains out of 5 homes on my block she is the only
one to complain.
Commenting on the comment above mine; uneducated enough said, and has no respect for anyone's right. I am a professional in Public Administration ,however I do not work in the town I live. My neighbor installed a OWB last fall 50 feet from my house. He in turn killed my plantlife, ruined the exterior of my home, and oh by the way makes it smoke filled too. I in turn hired an environmental lawyer, and low and behold there is federal /state nuisance laws that protect rights of the people who have smoke blown onto their property. I am currently in court fighting this matter and in the end my neighbor will lose because he has violated my right to quiet enjoyment. I am not dead set against OWBs, If you don't infringe on someone elses rights and you have tons of land for an OWB more power to you. But when someone says "I don't care what you think, or if you have clean air" which is my case is where I fight back. I am an advocate for freedom of choice. If you feel it is your freedom to build/use and OWB all power to you, but you do not have the right take that power from your neighbors and your community.
I think a lot of the issue is with people's idea that they can burn everything and anything. greenwood, construction leftovers, junk mail. I know that a lot of people have had good experiences with OWB's, but as rural areas become sub-urban we have to start thinking of how we treat each other. I've done some research on OWB's and other wood gasification boilers. Each have benefits, OWB's are outside, have been around a long time, etc. but technology has brought it to the next level with wood gasification. If you can have the savings benefits with wood, but have the smoke issue greatly reduced I would ask, why not see what other technology is out there to improve the situation. Some gasification boilers I read about, Tarm http://www.woodboilers.com, Greenwood Technologies http://www.greenwoodfurnace.com . Wood is a great way to get home heat. You are in control not the gas man.
it wont be long before big oil has OWB's banned. Al Gore and other "envirometalist" does not want you independant of gov controlled services.Enjoy your tax free heat now because it won't last much longer.
Heated lawsuit over stove's wood smoke -ON
Published: March 25, 2008 at 11:23 AM
UXBRIDGE, Ontario, March 25 (UPI)-- A southern Ontario family has been ordered to disconnect an outdoor wood-fired boiler from wood doctor Truro in a legal fight with neighbors over the smell, a judge ruled.
The spat between the two families in rural Uxbridge, northeast of Toronto, began two years ago when Iain Pike spent $13,400 on the device, which he told the Globe and Mail newspaper lowered his home and garage heating bills by two-thirds.
Neighbor Robert Scott complained the smoke was causing him and his family health problems and he sued for $200,000 in damages.
Pike argued unsuccessfully in court that neighbors on the other side didn't smell smoke and said they even paid to be hooked up to the water heating system for their home, the report said.
In ordering the boiler shutdown, Justice Fred Graham of the Ontario Superior Court cited medical concerns under review in Canada and the United States.
Figures for Canada aren't available, but the newspaper said the number of boilers sold in the United States jumped from 195 in 1990 to 67,546 in 2005, the latest year of statistics available. http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/03...
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