Alternative Fuel Choice

Wood burners as the heating technology of the future? You’re kidding right? Well, actually no. Throw together some history and an analysis of current affairs and this argument starts to look rather more compelling than it might initially appear.

Wind back to the early development of Philadelphia over two and a half centuries ago when a swiftly growing population brought about an acute shortage of wood. Luckily, one of America’s best known inventors at the time (Benjamin Franklin) had taken up residence in the city and designed a brand new “circulating wood stove” to tackle the problem.

The Franklin stove was an instant success, being as it was a fairly simple device yet remarkably effective at squeezing far more heat from significantly less firewood and it soon enough restored the balance between supply and demand. Certain obvious improvements (such as sealing the formerly open front) were made and thereafter the essential design altered very little until the latter part of the 20th Century.

Wood stoves stayed around but to some extent beneath the radar until the oil crisis in the 1970’s led to a shortage of fuel to run modern day household boilers and there followed a large price hike (sound familiar?). Once more many people looked to the wood burner for an answer (albeit for subtly different reasons than the first time around).

It could all have gone horribly wrong at this point as two hundred year old heating technology confronted contemporary fuel efficiency and pollution regulations. But instead there were soon wood burners that boasted heat resistant linings, automation, and catalytic converters even. This new breed was a genuine match for even the most contemporary oil and gas boilers.

The wood stove continued comfortably along in this new improved form, but remained a decidedly modest player in the heating technology world. That was until oil depletion and climate change started creeping up the global agenda. Unquestionably the escalating price of oil initially drove this new resurgence in the popularity of the humble wood burner, but concern about carbon footprints was also becoming a factor.

People have hitherto been drawn to burning wood because of the relatively low cost, but there’s more to the story than that. Wood is not only a renewable resource, since you always grow more trees, but it is in effect carbon neutral. Growing a new tree for firewood uses two plentiful and cost-free ingredients: sunlight and atmospheric carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is turned into carbon (wood) in the shape of the new tree and oxygen as a type of waste product.

Burning wood releases back only the CO2 that was earlier removed from the atmosphere by the original tree, and growing another tree will in turn recover the CO2 released by burning. It’s a well balanced CO2 cycle. Not that this is about to transform the world any time soon, but as a heating technology the wood burner unquestionably has a bright future. It is, if you like, a type of delayed action solar energy that conveniently also helps lower CO2 pollution.

For much more information on this subject, check out these additional articles about the wood burning and designer woodburners.

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