[Stoves] particulate toxicity discussion

Norbert Senf norbert.senf at gmail.com
Fri May 25 13:27:39 CDT 2018


 >>From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>

>>Thanks Norbert that was a great find.

I was not referring to the certification of stoves in the comment below, I
was referring to the declaration that particles are equally toxic for
regulatory purposes, then the host of regulations and guidelines which
followed.
(snip)
------------------separator-------------------------

Hi Crispin: OK, understood.
Our own work has mainly revolved around finding a simplified way to get a
reliable "EPA number" for an appliance.
Getting a representative PM factor (grams of PM per kg of fuel burned) can
get complicated without even addressing the toxicity.

I've found a couple of good rules of thumb:
- (from Tami Bond): there are basically 2 kinds of PM, tar (OC) and soot
(EC). To get tar, you need smoldering combustion. Soot comes from flaming
combustion.
- tar is 10X as toxic as soot (roughly, based on one study from Switzerland
I've found, done on rats)

>From the cleaner appliances like pellet stoves and masonry heaters, we only
get soot. At the other end of the spectrum we have outdoor boilers, which
are almost always in smolder mode and can easily have a 100X higher PM
number. Since they make tar, they conceivably produce 1000X the toxicity
from the same piece of wood, doing the same job (domestic heating).

A pretty good indicator of soot, as far as I can tell so far, is that your
filter is black, but has no smell.

-- 
Norbert Senf
Masonry Stove Builders
25 Brouse Road, RR 5
Shawville Québec J0X 2Y0
819.647.5092
www.heatkit.com
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