Clean Diesel

While the wood burning stove doesn’t sound even remotely futuristic, there are in fact a variety of simple yet compelling reasons why this apparent relic of track record is poised to re-emerge as an important heating technology in the years ahead.

The original wood burning stove was born of necessity about two hundred and fifty years ago when the rapid expansion of Philadelphia led to a chronic shortage of firewood. One of the residents happened to be the famous inventor Benjamin Franklin, who developed the circulating stove to alleviate this problem.

The Franklin stove was an instant success, being as it was a fairly uncomplicated device yet remarkably effective at squeezing far more heat from significantly less firewood and it soon enough restored the balance between supply and demand. Certain obvious improvements (such as sealing the previously open front) were made and thereafter the fundamental design altered very little until the latter part of the 20th Century.

By the time the 1970s rolled around, a familiar story resurfaced; the oil crises of that period of time restricted the supply of oil which in turn impacted the many people who by this time depended on gas and oil to run their heating systems. Many quite sensibly started to reconsider wood burners given the easily available and thus more affordable supply of fuel.

This time however there were all manner of fresh constraints to contend with; put simply you couldn’t install a wood stove any more unless it complied with rigorous emission and efficiency standards. But rather than put people off, this instead spurred on development of the technology to incorporate features such as catalytic converters, heat absorbing liners and automatic controls and fuel supplies. It wasn’t long before wood burners were able to compete head on with normal gas and oil fired boilers.

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.

Burning wood is in fact not only cheap, it’s also a more or less carbon neutral and completely renewable form of energy. So long as the sun continues to shine, trees will soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and split it into carbon in the form of wood and oxygen which is released back into the air.

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 dominant heating technology, woodburning is most likely to be with us for quite some time yet. Think of it as a form of solar energy that helps clear CO2 from the air while the fuel grows.

For much more information on this subject, check out these additional articles about wood burners stoves and wood stoves.