Outdoor wood furnaces (boilers) became very popular over the last 15 years. They are cheaper than fuel oil. A traditional wood stove has to be refilled every 2 hours (or so), and is also a major fire hazard. "Wood burners" may also include pellet stoves which are also increasingly popular for similar reasons.
There’s been a boom in outdoors living, camping as well as DIY cabins in Japan the past decade, and with these comes the all too familiar wood stove as part of the imagery.
Many professionals I’ve spoken to advise against the wood stove, because it complicates contruction, is a huge fire hazard in a neighbourhood of wooden houses and not really economical at heating a dwelling.
But it looks cool (present imagery of American country side) so it sells.
* people have wood anyway so they might as well use it for something
* it often suits the design of houses here which were historically built for a central stove burner like this
* many people have wood-burning stoves for cooking that are extremely large and heavy permanent fixtures in their kitchen and cannot easily be removed or adapted and are designed to permanently be burning wood so you can't really turn them off either
* people like the smell and aesthetic (note this article is in just about the most middle-class publication there is in the UK)
Wood stoves are really efficient these days, hitting 70% plus, and it's Carbon Neutralish™ as a fuel source (obviously uses fossil fuels for harvest and transport and such, but that's only some percentage of the total)
I'm always amazed at the ability of our questionable 1990s wood stove to happily heat the entire house. It's a great backup heat source on days when it gets proper cold out, which is thankfully rare here.
The people I know with wood-burning stoves also have modern electric or natural gas ranges for their daily cooking. Their stoves are primarily for heat, with cooking as an added bonus. But those stoves are more like a metal box with a chimney, not the large cooking-oriented stoves in the article.
Purely out of curiosity (I've never permanently lived somewhere where woodburning stoves were essential for home heating): is this because people are over-burning wood to compensate for the slow warming-up time, or because the stoves themselves are inefficient, or something else?
I don't know about you, but I live in a log cabin in the back woods of Canada and have only wood stoves lined with bricks to keep me warm in winter (and we have a real Winter here). The cook stove has a cistern (water tank) for greater thermal mass and the stoves have baffles for high efficiency. The fuel grows all around me do it's carbon neutral (except for the chainsaw gas, but that's a luxury I will not forego).
This is not a used-to-was thing. It's the norm outside of towns in my county.
There are plenty of wood stoves available these days with what are effectively catalytic converters. Wood stove particulate emission can be a lot lower than it used to.
It's an interesting idea although I assume it has to be somewhat baked into new house/addition construction.
A big downside of conventional wood stoves I find is that, if I'm not going to be hanging out at home--mostly around where the fire is--for the day it's not really worth it a lot of the time. I fire up my wood stove mostly when it's especially cold and I'm not primarily working in my office.
I know a lot of people near us (in the UK) went out and bought log burners for their houses - chatting to some neighbours last year and they were saying there was a 6 month waiting list to have one installed.
For the first time in 8? years we struggled to get hold of logs - especially oaks.
Nobody seemed to be able to get hold of anything.
Let me start by saying I really appreciate your comments on this site. I upvote a lot of your comments on a lot of threads, and appreciate seeing what you have to say. But although wood heat is a complex issue, I don't think you are correct here. Having looked at it pretty closely, I think modern wood heat is good solution for homes in the rural Northeastern US.
Yes, air pollution is a big problem. Modern catalytic stoves are much lower on particulate emissions than older models. The one we have (https://www.woodstove.com/index.php/progress-hybrid) has about 1/10 the emissions of older models. Efficiency is also about 30% higher, which reduces CO2 emissions. With a reasonably designed system (draft that draws in outside air) indoor pollution isn't particularly an issue. Locally harvested wood is quite sustainable, and very close to CO2 neutral. We manage our forest land, and cutting wood is an essential part of this management. And mentally, it really is pleasing to feel in control of the whole process --- cut trees, burn trees, grow more trees.
Since we're not on natural gas, the best alternative at this point would probably be a solar system and an electric heat pump. As we get older, and are are less able to harvest our own wood, we'll look into it more seriously. I think for right now, though, wood burning makes good sense for us both financially and ecologically. That said, I would be interested to see any sources you might have that compare modern efficient wood stoves with the alternatives.
Wood stove tech has also increased quite a bit though it’s still relatively rare to see 85+% efficiency. Access to free firewood is one topping point, but depending on electricity can be a serious issue in some areas.
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