SteamyTea

About time this started to go mainstream. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2119595-wood-burners-london-air-pollution-is-just-tip-of-the-iceberg/ By Michael Le Page Last week, air pollution in London soared to heights not seen since 2011. The usual suspects were named and shamed, including traffic fumes and a lack of wind. But joining them was a surprising culprit. “We think about half of the peak was from wood smoke,” says Timothy Baker, part of a team at King’s College London that monitors air pollution. The trendy log-burning stoves producing much of this pollution are marketed as a source of renewable energy that can cut fuel bills while helping reduce global warming. But recent findings suggest they pose a serious threat to the health of their owners, and are also accelerating climate change in the short term. If nothing is done to discourage log burning in homes, it could become the biggest source of air pollution in cities like London. In the UK as a whole, wood burning is already officially the single biggest source of an especially nasty form of air pollution. “I love sitting by a log fire as much as the next person but maybe we need to think again before it’s too late,” says climate scientist Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, UK. Air pollution is awful for our health. The smallest particles get into our blood and even our brains, increasing the risk of many disorders including heart disease. Natural killer Children are especially vulnerable: high pollution levels impair their lung and brain development. Air pollution from all sources is estimated to cause some 10,000 premature deaths a year in London alone, where it frequently exceeds legal limits. Wood smoke may be natural, but it contains many of the same harmful substances as cigarette smoke. It’s a massive killer worldwide, causing as many as 4 million premature deaths every year through indoor air pollution. In the UK, however, the problem with pollution from wood fires was thought to have been solved by clean air laws introduced in the 1950s, which banned wood burning in open fires in cities. “The official view is that residential wood burning is a thing of the past,” says Gary Fuller of King’s College London. Yet logs can still be burned in officially approved stoves in cities. Sales of these stoves have soared in the past decade, rising to nearly 200,000 a year. They are marketed as a way for people to drastically reduce their carbon emissions and save on fuel costs. Even modern stoves described as “low emission” are highly polluting. And in an echo of the diesel car emissions scandal, measurements during actual use in homes show that the stoves produce more pollution than lab tests suggest. In the “smokeless” fumes coming from the chimney of a house with a modern “eco-friendly” wood burner, Kåre Press-Kristensen of the Danish Ecological Council has measured 500,000 microscopic particles per cubic centimetre. The same equipment finds fewer than 1000 particles per cm3 in the exhaust fumes of a modern truck. The wood stove was certified as meeting Nordic Swan Ecolabel emission standards, which are stricter than the ones stoves in the UK have to meet. Big in London What this means is that a small increase in wood-burning stoves can produce a big increase in pollution. In Copenhagen, a city of 600,000 people, just 16,000 wood stoves produce more PM2.5 pollution – the most dangerous particles, smaller than 2.5 micrometres – during winter than traffic does all year round, says Press-Kristensen. Wood burning is becoming a big problem in London, too. In 2010, when Fuller analysed particulate pollution to discover its source, he found that 10 per cent of all the city’s wintertime pollution was from wood. There are many reasons to think that figure is higher now. A 2015 government survey found that domestic wood consumption in the UK was three higher than previous estimates, with 7 per cent of respondents reporting that they burned logs. “Wood consumption is increasing substantially,” says Eddy Mitchell at the University of Leeds, UK. When he, Forster and others fed the data on wood consumption into a computer model of air pollution, their conclusion was disturbing: PM2.5 pollution from residential stoves is soaring in the UK (see diagram, below). “There is a real risk that if we have a lot more residential wood burning then it could undo our other efforts to control air pollution,” says Fuller. The harm far exceeds traffic pollution, he says. While people are exposed to high levels of traffic pollution mainly when travelling on busy streets, wood burning produces huge amounts of pollution where people live, when they are at home. Indoor smog Press-Kristensen has been measuring that pollution inside homes in Copenhagen. In three out of seven tests done so far, he has found very high levels. In one home with a modern log-burning stove, he found particulate levels several times higher than the highest ever recorded outdoors there (see diagram, above). So do the health impacts outweigh any climate benefits? Astonishingly, there might not be any climate benefits, at least in the short term. Burning logs is often touted as being carbon-neutral. The idea is that trees soak up as much carbon dioxide when growing as they release when burned. In fact, numerous studies show that wood burning is not carbon-neutral, and can sometimes be worse than burning coal. There are emissions from transport and processing. Logs are often pre-dried in kilns, for instance. Burning wood also emits black carbon – soot – that warms the atmosphere during the short time it remains in the air. Most studies ignore this, but Mitchell and Forster calculate that over 20 years – the timescale that matters if we don’t want the world to go too far above 2°C of warming – soot cancels out half the carbon benefits of all wood burning. For home wood burning, the figures are even worse. “On a 20-year timescale, wood stoves provide little or no benefit, but they do on the 100-year timescale as they remove some of the long-term warming effect of CO2 emissions,” says Forster. Press-Kristensen’s calculations show much the same thing. And both sets of findings almost certainly underestimate the problem, because they assume wood burning is carbon-neutral. Defenders of wood stoves point out that there is a lot of uncertainty about how much black carbon is emitted when wood is burned and how large its effect is. Patricia Thornley of the University of Manchester, UK, thinks we need more real-world measurements before coming to conclusions. But the uncertainties cut both ways. For instance, the effects of black carbon can be amplified if it is deposited on snow and melts it, exposing dark land that absorbs more heat. It’s possible soot from wood burning is contributing to the fall in spring snow cover in Europe, but it’s very hard to study. More research is needed to pin down the precise climatic effects of wood burning, which can vary hugely depending on factors such as the source of wood and where the pollution goes. What is clear, however, is that burning logs in homes in towns and cities is not the best use of the wood we have. It produces more pollution than wood-burning power plants that can be fitted with expensive filters, it produces that harmful pollution where lots of people live, and it has the least climate benefits, if any. “If we are going to burn biomass to meet climate targets, then we ought to do it in big, remote power stations,” says Martin Williams of King’s College London, who is studying the health impacts of the ways the UK could meet its climate targets. Most researchers say it isn’t their role to make policy recommendations, but it would be best if cities like London discourage private wood burning before it becomes an even bigger health problem. At the moment, all the focus is on diesel vehicles. Press-Kristensen doubts governments will ban wood-burning; France recently backtracked on a proposed ban on open fires, for example. Instead, he proposes installing heat sensors in chimneys and taxing people when they burn wood, with the level of tax depending on how polluting the appliance is. Most importantly, governments must not ignore health impacts when deciding climate policies, says Press-Kristensen. “I like fires, but I have to say they are as polluting as hell,” he says. Thinking of getting a wood-burner? Wood-burning stoves are touted as an eco-friendly way to heat your house cheaply. But tests now show that even new, properly installed stoves can produce dangerous levels of outdoor and indoor pollution (see main story). What other options are there? Consider instead Stick with gas or oil for heating, and spend your money on insulation. Get a heat pump if you can afford it Fake it You can get the same cosy feeling from a log-effect electric or gas fireplace, the best of which are hard to distinguish from the real thing Already have a wood-burner? Here’s how to minimise its effects: Don't burn scrap wood Scrap wood or painted wood can release highly toxic substances such as arsenic when burned Burn wood that's just right Burning dry wood with a moisture content of about 20 per cent minimises pollution. But if wood is wetter or drier than that, pollution increases

I assume you mean 111 kWh/month rather than 111 kh. DHW should be between 1 kWh and 4 kWh /day per person (short shower or full bath). So if we call that 3 kWh/day for the two of you, that is 90 kWh in DHW, leaving 40 kWh for the space heating. Seems pretty good to me.

Right, let's escalate this further' "Ho Ho Ho, it's the first of May, outdoor f****** starts today" Sent by text from a female friend.

You deviant

If it stays in the garage, then the summer will be a good one. You can tell it is based on a Vitesse by the way the rear wheels point; inwards. Better turning circle than the TF though. Can you squeeze a Triumph 2500 PI under the bonnet? my Father had a TR6, seemed quite fast back in the day (Probably no faster than my C-Max TDCi).

What is the kit car? And the site looks a bit different than it did when I came over. And how did your builders not get soaked, it has been horribly wet down my end of the county.

Try sleep apnea, after almost 3 minutes of not breathing, I am happy to wake up. The solution is to get an evening job and get home knackered. Now the full sentence for context For so many reasons. The impossibility of teaching teenagers who have raging hormones (lucky sods) is part of the reason I don't teach the school drop outs any more.

We had a service technician that was trying to correct the PH on a spa bath. He was mixing up chemicals and pouring them into the balance tank and then giving it a few minutes to circulate before manually checking the PH. Silly sod forgot to turn the automatic chemical doser off. The building had to be evacuated. As Helen (Pippa Hayward) often said in the Brittas Empire "Remember what happened at Bedford".

It is a while since I have used the rolling pin on myself. Too many years at Catholic schools taught me one thing, you don't have to self flagellation to have fun: http://old.wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=self+flagellation&t=1000&a=n Now try rolling pin or dirty boots

That would be true if we traded in houses i.e. they were the currency. There are other pressures on our cash though that come into play. Or is shows what a basket case our economy really is.

I live on my own.

Two unique things happen in that period though. The first was the removal of double tax relief on mortgage repayments (August 1989) and the UK falling out of the ERM (sept 1992). The first one can never be repeated and it led to a very rapid rise in property prices (doubling prices in some areas in 5 months), we also had much higher taxation levels and smaller personal allowances. We also had a Chancellor that did not know what to do (Lamont), so interest rates, which had been gentle falling for a decade (from a 1980 peak of 16%) to a 1989 low of 7.5%, suddenly shot up to 15%. They then had a rapid decline over about 18 month to about 6%, stabilising at around 5% between 1995 and 2008. That stability was brought about by Gordon Brown handing over interest rate control to the Bank of England (if we want to know one good thing he did, it was that). Two other things that happened is trading barriers were removed between us and the EU (who remembers 1992), and global trade increased massively (what the Boris and Trump tapped into). This suppressed inflation by causing deflation in labour costs on manufactured goods (but not domestic infrastructure projects). This freed up cash for the public to spend on other things. And they did spend, on better cars (BMWs and Mercs were rare in 1885) and also helped to drive house inflation (the public likes to spend money). Some of those things are probably not going to happen again (tax relief, government control of interest rates, reduced trading barriers). When people are uncertain they put their money into safe investments, property is one of them, as is gold and alcohol and tobacco shares). What I find amazing is that the British public still believe that there is security in high housing costs, I would have thought that a quick look at the last 30 years of the British housing market would have shown that it is anything but. We still do it though

Just had a play with the lights, pointing them up to the ceiling and the reading is 600lux, turn them off and it is 10lux. That is reflected light. Putting up a bit of dark printed card a metre away and the reading is 125lux, 5lux with just ambient light (this is indoors and it is grey and horrible today).

Wind speed and direction makes a lot of difference. If you plot mean temperatures by wind direction you will see what I mean. As an example I have plotted one years data from the Land's End weather station (as I know it is exposed and not affected much by the land mass). You can see that when the wind comes from the NE, it is colder than when the wind comes from the South. This only show part of the problem, as the frequency of wind direction is also important. NE winds happen 7% of the time, but Southern winds happen 5% of the time (Western is 14% and a mean temp of 11°C). Then you have to know what mean temperature you need to put the heating on (mine is about 9°C). And all that is before you take into account windspeed (low speed saps away less heat than high speed) and solar gain (Northerlies tend to cause clear skies) All good fun and well worth spending a couple of hours on to help work out if your house can be protected from the coldest, darkest and strongest winds that happen the most.

Is there a price premium for that? Be interesting to work out if it is cheaper to buy 'green electrons' in than make your own. I have always thought it was, but it is over a decade since I last looked in earnest.

Average or range, not both

There is also supply and demand on the lending of money, so it cuts both ways.

I got some of these for the art club. They are so bright they hurt my eyes, but light up the art work a treat. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/272361296435?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT Jo Those replacement are only 6W, not very bright.

Are you going to use the ASHP for both space heating and DHW. If you are, remember that they do different things, at different times and at different temperatures.

I liked the language they use, there is something politically incorrect about phrases from 1987

Not sure what the BCO is really after, but there are Class 1 gelcoats, Crystic Fireguard 72PA is one.

I am going to have to reread all that a bit more, and then a bit more again. I had forgotten what was trying to be modelled, which makes a difference to how I will read it.

Which is having the greater impact on slab temperature homogenisation (is that a real term, slab temperature evenness) and would a different sized buffer tank make a difference, or would it be better to have more control over the heat source (or what ever sort).

What is happening at between 22.5 and 23 (I assume °C), the heating side (the left) looks right, but the cooling side (the right) should not have such a pronounced change in it. How does ambient air temperature affect it?

What was your family business, our paths may have crossed in the past. Not really as I have been out of the business for a while. You could look for local GRP companies and see if they know, or suppliers. Not the sort of business happens in town centres these days (hard to believe that we had 400 litres of acetone a few feet from the Chilterns Railway line you could smell the factory in Wycombe high street).