[Stoves] News 24 Jan 2017: Dirty woodstoves cause a health crisis in London

Andrew Heggie aj.heggie at gmail.com
Sat Feb 4 14:15:54 CST 2017


On 4 February 2017 at 18:33,  <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear et al,
>
> The smell of wood smoke permeates upper income neighborhoods in YSO. The colder the weather the stronger the smell of wood fires. Some nights there are enough PICS at the level of my eyes and my nose outdoors to make my eyes smart and my nose to tingle a little.

Then you will agree that wood burning is something to do with the
"tragedy of the (unregulated) commons" if people are not dissuaded
from polluting the air we all have to breathe? I burn my wood as
cleanly as my stove allows but I understand I may have to change to
something inherently cleaner if it is identified as polluting.

Back on Nikhils original theme there has been yet another report

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2119595-wood-burners-london-air-pollution-is-just-tip-of-the-iceberg/

Which attributes half the particulates  that cause the recent high
pollution levels in London came from wood.

It goes on to imply that this wood burning was in all the recent
installation of DEFRA approved stoves, since they were exempted from
the smoke control areas in 2008.

I don't see how they differentiated particulates vented by these
stoves from other sources like diesel or open fires or other  sources
which may not even  have been "black carbon".

Let's not get into the premature deaths this has caused because Nikhil
has pointed out how this extrapolation  can be wildly out.

The article ends with the assertion that wood should only be burned at
20% moisture content, more or less increases pollution which bears a
little circumspection about the validity of the article as a whole.

Andrew




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