Doh! 'Science' catching up?

Saw this in the paper.  Main-stream/vested-interest business-first science in the slow lane again

Why Gosh they would just like us all to use nice safe electric power to heat our homes...Maybe build a nice old style coal plant... I hear they are not dangerous now!
Just too bad for you if you haven't worked because of covid and you can't pay your electric bill... so sorry... no pay... then no heat for you... But your little baby isn't being forced to breath that bad wood smoke!

If those biased big business scientists had been rocket scientists, they would have suggested throwing out the big bad blaze king and instructed you how to build a clean burning rocket mass heater!

I agree, lets do away with opening wood stove doors and instead light up a much "less irritating" cigarette instead.  

source

Just what is all that other particulate pollution? I would think releasing a puff of smoke in a house should increase the particulates several hundredfold. Whatever it is, it's being breathed 24/7.

I hate a stove that smokes badly, but nothing feel homier than a slight woodsmoke smell on a cold winter's day.

Whenever I see a click-bait news article being teased with the words "scientists say", my first question is "what did the scientists really say"? The actual study is available here: Actual Study

Upon reading the whole thing, my impression is that the study is something to be embraced by the permaculture community. The community has a pool of expertise uniquely qualified to tackle the action suggested in the study's conclusions -- modification of stove design to address the "flooding" problem at feeding time.

Here's a TLDR summary of the study:

Background and survey of literature:
1. There exists a toxic gick known as Particulate Matter (PM) which is linked to a number of adverse health effects.
2. There is increasing interest in the effects of short-term exposure to high levels of PMs as opposed to long-term exposure of low levels.
3. In the UK, Stoves for home heating are a primary source of PMs.
4. Sales of home stoves are a big business, increasing rapidly.
5. Commercial stoves have a government-sanctioned "smoke exempt" rating , implying to the consumer that they produce no emissions.
6. The existing "smoke exempt" rating is derived from bench-test studies rather than real-world use, and considers only what the stove emits to the outside air rather than what it emits inside the dwelling. The rating also relies on time-averaged PM levels, without consideration of peak levels.

Purpose of study:
1. Determine the level of indoor PM emission under real-world conditions.
2. Determine the peak levels of emission.
3. Verify whether the PM emissions are coming from the stove, rather than coming from the outside air.
4. Determine the extent to which the PM emissions are coming from stoves certified as "smoke exempt".

Potential value of study results:
1. Present a framework for evaluation of real-world indoor PM exposure.
2. Quantify peak levels of indoor PM exposure.
3. Analyse the results with respect to the government's existing "smoke exempt" regulations.

Conclusions:
1. While in use, stoves increase indoor PMs by roughly 65% overall.
2. PM peaks caused by feeding increase the hourly PM average by about 250-400%.
3. The increased PMs and PM peaks are not coming from the outside air.

Recommendations:
Below is the complete text of the study's recommendations. Note the call for devious experiments from the permaculture community (kickstarter for stove research?). No surprise that they suggest a label to let the consumer know that "smoke exempt" doesn't mean "gick-free". Like the "do not eat" warnings on dessicant packets and copier toner, this can protect the stove manufacturers from lawsuits based upon You never told me...:

"On the basis of these results, it is recommended that DEFRA testing standards be modified in order to account for these normative health risks. The PM that is released into the home is not an aberration from normal use, but results directly from it. This is because real-world operation cannot occur without opening the stove door. It may be that with regulatory encouragement stove designs can be modified in a way that limits such instances. In the meantime, or in the event that appropriate modification cannot be achieved, it is also recommended that new residential stoves be accompanied by a health warning at the point of sale in order to indicate the normative health risks posed to users."

I'm lighting up the fireplace tonight.  

One of the benefits of a J-tube style RMH, you never open up a door! So long as properly drafting of course, it's a non issue. Part of me thinks this is a sort of, "we need some more regulations on our regulations, to help protect those we are regulating from the regulations".

It seems like some of this may be down to user error. Or at least, certain user actions can either mitigate or increase the blow back of soot into the room.

With our stove if I open the door in one jerk a wave of air comes back out of the door. If I open the door a crack and let the new air flow settle down, then open it fully, I get nothing back in the room.

Michael, that's my experience with our wood stove as well. If I have the flows right there is little wood smoke odor. I haven't checked our particulate level in the house, but the incense I burn is adding far more particulate than the wood stove, at least at the visual and odor level.

The only time we get smoke in the room is if there is a big inversion, the stove is cold, and I'm too impatient to get a draft going with some newspaper.

The main health hazard is the less than 2.5 micron particles that you inhale all the way into the lungs. I'd like to see a study measuring this throughout the day, with and without a wood stove going. There are a lot of things that increase particles in the air, and I doubt that a wood stove is the only culprit.

It seems like some of this may be down to user error. Or at least, certain user actions can either mitigate or increase the blow back of soot into the room.

Some of the discussion in the study alludes to the "user error" issue, e.g., in the real world most people are pretty sloppy about how they tend a stove and what types of fuel they stuff into it. In the study design, there was consideration of how to ensure that the test households operate the stove as they normally would instead of being extra careful because they know they're being monitored.

An identical comparison study done with Rocket Mass Heaters would be a great selling point (assuming positive results).

At the last ATC one of the instructors recommended a box fan with a HEPA filter attached and have that running to pull indoor air through the filter as a cheap air filter. Not sure how fine the particles caught but it could be placed near any concern spot to run. He said the filter would dirty up pretty fast but my own experience didn’t see much. I might have done it incorrectly though.

Michael Cox wrote:It seems like some of this may be down to user error. Or at least, certain user actions can either mitigate or increase the blow back of soot into the room.

With our stove if I open the door in one jerk a wave of air comes back out of the door. If I open the door a crack and let the new air flow settle down, then open it fully, I get nothing back in the room.

I agree in principle, but we've found that the stove design also has an effect. Our downstairs wood stove is quite difficult to open without letting smoke into the house (although in other ways, it's a great wood-stove.) We wanted a stove for upstairs to fit into a 1980's fireplace and so we had to get what would fit. It's harder to get a good fire, but it rarely smokes back if I need to add more wood.

As people have suggested, if this sort of issue isn't tested in real life and reported on so that people can use it to make responsible decisions as a factor in stove purchase, we won't move forward in cleaning up homes and the environment. Wood is short-cycle carbon. Fossil fuels are long-cycle. Solar is short-cycle, but at this time, scaling solar panels up for heating seems beyond foolish, unless it's panels for heating liquid for in-floor radiant systems which few houses are set up for. I don't like the particulates our stoves put out. I'd like a better system, but at this point our house wouldn't be a good shape for an RMH. I wish that back in 1970 when the oil crisis happened, governments had put through legislation for serious insulation - that's the big "Doh!" for me!

I'm sorry, I should have clarified the clickbait reference. To locate the source of the posted information, I opened a search engine and entered the phrase "burners triple the level of harmful pollution". Twenty of the first 24 returns referenced the original story. I suspect that a sociologist would be intrigued by the evolution of the story across internet media. It appears to originate on the website of The Guardian, then spreads to other UK news media (Daily Mail, Telegraph, etc.). From there, it moves to facebook, youtube and various forums. I think that the award for Most Irresistible Header goes to "Wood burners are potential killers, scientists report".