Tomorrow\’s Heating Technology – The Wood Burner?

You must admit that proposing the wood stove as a mainstream heating technology for the 21st Century scarcely seems credible, but follow along and find out why this blast from the past has a rosy future ahead of it.

The first design of the wood stove dates back to the mid 18th Century and a certain Benjamin Franklin, who lived in the new and rapidly growing city of Philadelphia. The pace of development was such that there was soon a severe shortfall in firewood supplies which prompted him to invent a device he named the circulating stove.

This new stove was orders of magnitude more efficient than a conventional open fire, which meant quite simply that not as much wood was required which in turn considerably eased the excess demand for this limited resource. The initial design was soon improved with a front door, to seal and even better regulate the airflow, and it remained effectively unchanged for the next two hundred or so years.

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

However, things didn\’t pan out so simply. For a start there were now considerably more stringent controls on pollution and energy efficiency, so manufacturers set to redesigning key elements and using modern materials. Pretty soon the modern wood burner had heat retaining linings, catalytic converters, automated fuel feed and control systems, and had parked its tanks squarely on the conventional gas boiler\’s lawn.

This reinvention of the wood burning stove ambled along for a few more decades, up until the early 21st Century when it started to hit home that a) CO2 emissions are a serious issue, and b) oil really will run out. As still more people clambered aboard the (by now highly efficient and low pollution) wood burner bandwagon another thought also occurred.

The thing is that wood burning uses a renewable energy supply (trees) and can also be in effect fairly neutral as regards CO2 pollution. Trees have need of two major inputs: CO2 which they soak up from the air and solar energy (sunlight). From these they create carbon (i.e. wood) and give off the now redundant oxygen back to the atmosphere.

All that is necessary to clean up the CO2 released by burning the wood from a tree is to grow another tree. It really is as simple as that and for that reason, although it will probably never become a predominant heating technology, woodburning is most likely to be with us for quite some time yet. Think of it as a type of solar energy that helps wash CO2 from the air while the fuel grows.

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

AZAC

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