Wood stove

[saveasteading]

3 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Mainly because it was a flippant remark

Thanks for acknowledging this

 

But it was also the bottom 3 of the pyramid above.

I don't think anyone is attacking you personally, but your statements, and it is useful always to see opposing arguments.

[SteamyTea]

Just now, saveasteading said:

don't think anyone is attacking you personally

Well it has been acknowledge that it has is.

But I can take it.

 

Neighbours cat is alive, think I might move in with it as the house is warmer than mine, and the snark meter is showing that the energy usage is almost double mine.

 

 

[joe90]

42 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle

 

 

However, it also says…..

Whether age influences the readiness to accept new ideas has been empirically criticised. In the case of acceptance of evolution in the years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species, age was a minor factor.^[2] On a more specialized scale, it also was a weak factor in accepting cliometrics.^[7] A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists.^[8] However, a more recent study on life science researchers found that following the deaths of preeminent researchers, publications by their collaborators rapidly declined while the activity of non-collaborators and the number of new researchers entering their field rose.^[9]

[Gone West]

3 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

So is this becoming a personal attack on me.

Certainly not. I agree with you about burning wood, in fact burning anything probably isn't much good for the atmosphere. We all have to exist and make decisions about how our choices affect the planet. I was pointing out that there are other unnecessary things we might do that affect the environment.

[Tetrarch]

17 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

My thoughts are that there are no 'right settings'.

 

 

I agree that ad hominem attacks on you are undesireable. I also agree that dismissing your entire argument because of a few personal inconsistencies and imperfections isn't appropriate.

 

However, your "no right settings" comment is also both deliberately dismissive and too broad a generalisation and weakens your argument

 

For urban areas you have a point, but from semi-rural to Scottish Highlands then their use can be acceptable, especially if no gas is available.

 

I am a double-biomass user - Wood Pellets and a WBS. I have no access to gas and decided to ditch a decades-old oil boiler. I would be interested to know whether your critique of WBS extends to pellet boilers also?

 

Regards

 

Tet 

[SteamyTea]

13 minutes ago, Tetrarch said:

whether your critique of WBS extends to pellet boilers also

Yes it does.

 

You say you have no access to gas, but what you mean is, no access to cheap and reliable, pay monthly in arrears, natural gas.

Which I di not have either.

 

There are two issues with combustion technologies, gaseous and particulate emissions.

Wood burning is bad on both fronts.

This does not mean we can get rid of all combustion tomorrow, but adding tens of thousands of micro combustion plants with little control of the fuel source does not seem to be a solution.

 

I really don't understand the 'I live in a rural area', surely what is wanted is clean air, well cleaner than cities.

If a farm makes a bad smell, or pollutes, it is stopped, the same rules need to apply to individuals.

[Thedreamer]

3 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

with little control of the fuel source does not seem to be a solution.

 

Some folk like me have control over the fuel. 

 

3 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

I really don't understand the 'I live in a rural area', surely what is wanted is clean air,

 

 

I have my wood burner on tonight and if you monitored the air outside any PM would not be to a level that would be classed as causing any damage to your health.

[George]

I've been hunting around for whether different types of PM2.5 pose more danger or not. PM2.5 is a physical description of size and doesn't describe the chemical effect of the particulate. 

 

I haven't found a good answer - it seems to be that the measuring equipment is pretty good at detecting PM2.5 but it is not very good at detecting what it is made out of. 

 

The indication is there are more chemically damaging types of PM2.5. But there isn't enough evidence to be conclusive. Intuitively, PM2.5 made of carbon is probably less harmful than PM2.5 made of VOCs, ammonium & sodium nitrate etc. Still doesn't mean a wood burner is a good choice for urban areas but the overall picture is potentially more nuanced. 

[SteamyTea]

2 hours ago, Thedreamer said:

I have my wood burner on tonight and if you monitored the air outside any PM would not be to a level that would be classed as causing any damage to your health.

Even though the WHO said there is no safe level. The other, more important thing is, none of us know what your local particulate levels are.  Basing health decisions on how one likes to think they are, and what they really are, is a recipe for disaster.

1 hour ago, George said:

it seems to be that the measuring equipment is pretty good at detecting PM2.5 but it is not very good at detecting what it is made out of. 

They can do isotope testing to establish where they come from, but that is expensive.

1 hour ago, George said:

The indication is there are more chemically damaging types of PM2.5. But there isn't enough evidence to be conclusive.

You are right, they do not now if one chemical base is worse than another, which leads onto this

 

1 hour ago, George said:

PM2.5 made of carbon is probably less harmful than PM2.5 made of VOCs, ammonium & sodium nitrate etc

There are two affects, one from the physical size, which can pass though cell walls, and then the chemical reactions, which are amplified by the surface area.

 

This is a well written article.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191113-the-toxic-killers-in-our-air-too-small-to-see

 

One of the problems with medical research is people, we are all a little bit different.

Some things are near enough certain i.e. 100m fall onto a concrete slab will be fatal.  Other things less so i.e. exposure to the influenza virus, fatal for a few, unnoticed by a few, the 70% in the middle will have symptoms that range from a slight sniffle and a mild headache to quite sever illness that requires hospitalisation and technical medical intervention.

One of the problems with associating one cause to one illness in one person is very difficult and is usually what a Coroner has to do in mysterious deaths.

Luckily we have epidemiologists that are trained to spot true patterns in data and work out the most likely cause, even if the mechanism isn't fully understood.  We can thank Florence Nightingale for this, she was very good at presenting data showing that more solders died of infection than injury, even though the cause of the infection was not fully understood, and at the time, antibiotics were unavailable.

We are probably at this stage with particulates, but luckily we have much better data and analytical techniques these days, so getting the scientific truth is generally quicker.

Google Scholar is pretty good for finding research, 

I just did a simple search for PM2.5 between 1980 and 1990, 644 results.

1990 to 2000, 8430 results

2000 to 2010, 32,300 results

2010 to 2020 150,000 results

2020 to 2023, 91,400 results

Seems there is quite a lot of interests.

(there will be some double counting and irrelevant papers, but there is a lot of scientific research happening in the field.