Firelogs? Coal? Briquettes? Logs? Or wha'? (1 Viewer)

[pissypants]

You want an open fire for the winter, but what's your preferred medium?
I've been trying firelogs - those sort of compressed woodchip looking things. Handy enough, they throw out a lot of heat, but they're hard enough to light and keep going, and burn pretty fast. On the up side, they burn down to virtually nothing, so are an easy cleanup. What's your preference for a toasty winter hearth?


AAAAAH!

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[egg_]

Hmm yeah, I assumed "locally" meant "Ireland", but it might not I suppose. The winter before last we bought some wood from a crowd that I know have their own forests in Co. Meath, but it was wet as fuck and a total pain in the arse to burn

FSC certification, according to my ecologist wife, is "not perfect but better than not having it". If you buy FSC-certified wood then you can be pretty sure that it's from a managed forest (rather than, for example, clear-cutting a protected forest), and they're taking at least some care of wildlife and ecosystem conservation. She says Coillte becoming FSC-certified is the reason they don't plant conifers on bogs on anymore (cos they're no longer allowed to)

I don't think you should let that Guardian story depress you too much - there have been unintended consequences of biomass subsidies for sure, but mitigating climate change is going to take a lot of trying-things-that-don't-work. The Estonian govt is going to start getting hit with EU fines if they're flouting the Habitats Directive, which hopefully will push things back in the other direction

 

[Lili Marlene]

Thanks egg!

 

[magicbastarder]

Wood burners cause nearly half of urban air pollution cancer risk – study

Exclusive: Wood smoke is a bigger cancer risk than pollution from vehicles, finds Athens analysis

www.theguardian.com

 

[Cornu Ammonis]

Wood burners cause nearly half of urban air pollution cancer risk – study

Exclusive: Wood smoke is a bigger cancer risk than pollution from vehicles, finds Athens analysis

www.theguardian.com

Well that’s depressing.

 

[magicbastarder]

i'll go back to my usual defensive fallback - do they know how much of that is due to open fires, and how much due to stoves?
i'd suspect that if there were 5 stoves for every open fire, the open fires would still constitute the majority of the woodsmoke pollution.

 

[magicbastarder]

i will be getting a lot of ash wood in a few weeks, probably. i have two, possibly three potential uses for it; turning and burning being the main two, and possibly using it to grow mushrooms as a third option.
lots of it will be too small to turn on the lathe or turn into shrooms, but will be fine for the stove (once seasoned)
if i burn it in the fire, my gas usage will drop; GFCH is the main heat source in the house. so i can reduce the amount of CO2 i produce (the wood will otherwise rot down over several years anyway) but at the cost of local air pollution obviously.
so not an easy balance to reach.

 

[ann post]

I'm kinda boxed in like that too. Something like 5-10 pines gotta come down before they become a danger to the neighbours. I can either let them sit there and rot or slice them up fires and projects. They are gonna be replaced by native species. Also have a stove so get huge heat mileage out of a few logs. My little drying shed made a huge difference. I've been pitching the gas temp to kick off once the fire is up to the job.