What’s The Future For Woodburners?

For an example of an environmentally sound, high efficiency technology with a promising future ahead of it, most people likely would not immediately think of the humble wood burner. This is, after all, something that seems to have altered very little since its original development a couple of centuries back.

But scratch the traditional looking surface (whose purpose is to deliberately convey an old world look) and the contemporary wood burning stove boasts combustion efficiency close to what a conventional gas boiler can manage. These under the cover improvements have of course been driven by the need comply with ever tighter standards.

However a lot of folk still get nervous about setting fire to wood, even though they have no qualms about “switching on” the gas. It’s probably because logs quite clearly come from felled trees and smoke is more visible than the exhaust from a gas flame. Yet the reality is quite the reverse.

In order to be viable as a sustainable fuel source, you need to grow new trees to replace the ones you fell for firewood. In fact you need rather a lot of trees growing at the same time because they take time to reach maturity. Each of these trees in fact soaks up from the atmosphere more or less the same quantity of CO2 as will be released again when it is burnt.

In other words, whatever is put into the air is always removed again by new growth – a balanced CO2 cycle. Compare this with conventional fossil fuels which cannot be replaced. Here the CO2 goes in only one direction – into the atmosphere.

Clearly now, a well understood and moderately scalable technology coupled with a genuinely recyclable source of energy is going to appeal at the best of times. In the context of the pressing need to tackle CO2 pollution, it’s starting to really get some attention.

You can already see how wood burning is shaping up for a comfortable future in both the number of people adopting it as either a primary of supplemental source of heating, and the shift in regulations to encourage it.

Being as it is also relatively cheap to run compared to typical gas and oil systems, wood burning clearly has significant appeal to those people in a position to adopt it. It is not however any kind of cure-all for the many problems of the world. But the advantages are such that it has definitely booked its place among the technologies of the future.

If you found this interesting then be sure to check out these additional articles to find out much more about the modern woodburner and wood burning in general.

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