Disaster in progress: North America's home heating transition (wood)

[phantom power]

I wasn't aware of these external furnaces. Anybody seeing them around?

With natural gas prices creeping higher on a daily basis, some homeowners dependent on natural gas for heat are starting to look for cheaper alternatives. In my area the outdoor wood burning furnace which is designed to supplement existing home heating has become a major source of friction among suburban residents.

The main complaint is the smoke produced by these furnaces as they heat water that is then pumped to the owner's house where a heat exchanger disperses the heat. A loophole in U. S. Environmental Protection Agency rules has left such furnaces unregulated though many municipalities and states are now seeking to ban them or at least regulate them. Part of the problem is that some furnace owners don't just burn wood; sometimes they burn household trash. Emissions from these furnaces have been measured by one government agency and the results are rather startling:

A 2006 report from the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, a nonprofit association of Northeast air quality agencies, found that average particulate emissions from one outdoor wood boiler equaled that of 22 wood stoves, 205 oil furnaces or as many as 8,000 natural gas furnaces.

(...)

The move to alternative sources of heat will put pressure on the remaining forests in North America as demand for wood and wood products for burning increases. This transition will also threaten the climate and air quality as coal-burning expands, and it has the potential to push grain prices even higher as homeowners compete for increasingly scarce grain to feed grain-burning furnaces. Electricity may also become a source of heat via portable electric space heaters, especially in the case of an acute crisis, and their use could potentially threaten the electrical grid.

[GliderGuider]

1. Yes. Friends who live on a farm have one.

It's about a 6x6x6 foot black cube that heats water in a jacket and pipes it to the house. It smokes, but they're on 40 acres, so the neigbours don't complain. And it doesn't need oil or gas. They also have a 3KW PV system, solar hot water, chickens, sheep and alpacas. Guess what they're getting ready for?

[XemaSab]

4. Forget your troubles, come on get happy...

It's time to dance all your cares away... :party:

[Lorien]

2. Our way of life is unsustainable any way you look at it

ZPG (an idea that even many DUers balk at) and new technologies are about our only hope. Most local governments are about as dumb as a post on this stuff, too. When Florida was hit by four hurricanes in 2004, state and local officials had the trees that had been toppled in the storms brought to county landfills and fairgrounds to be burned in massive bonfires. I saw 15 story high mountains of oak trees burn for weeks on end. What about turning them into fuel, or paper, or lumber??? The same was done after Katrina. Laziness and lack of imagination will kill us all just as quickly as greed will.

[izquierdista]

3. Another tale of unsustainability

Driving along I-40 in New Mexico and Oklahoma, I could not believe it, but workers were preparing to throw away an interstate highway. They had scabbled all the concrete down to the roadbed and had collected up the rebar (I guess their effort to recycle :-) ). In my engineering education, they taught us that concrete takes decades to reach its maximum strength, so I was wondering: what was wrong with the road? I also seem to recall that some Roman roads are still in use, a couple millenia after they were first installed. So much for quality American craftsmanship.

[DCKit]

5. I looked at the outdoor furnaces some years ago.

The actual efficiency is far lower than advertised. One comment I read mentioned how a family was now burning 4x more wood than before to heat their house and having to fill the firebox 3x per day.

There are excellent wood stoves available that burn cleanly and efficiently - many even without catalytic converters.

[madokie]

6. They're pretty popular around here in NE OK

the ones I know who have them, 5 families, say they use more wood that when they used to just burn wood directly in a stove but except for the coldest days they only have to load the firebox once a day and on the real cold days once in the morning and then again in the evenings. The difference is with burning wood directly there is warm and cold areas where as with the exterior furnaces they are using the ductwork from their gas heating systems so the comfort level is better. We use wood pellets to heat with and have been since the winter of '92 to a huge savings each winter over electric or propane our other choices. Our pellet stoves have paid for themselves many times over in savings these last 16 winters.