Woodburners – The Heating Technology Of The Future?

For an example of an environmentally sound, high efficiency technology with a promising future before of it, most people likely would not straight away think of the humble wood burner. This is, after all, an item that appears to have altered very little since its invention a couple of centuries back.

Yet concealed within its intentionally dated styling sits a highly effective, high combustion burner that can essentially match the average domestic gas boiler. Despite appearances, the wood burner has come a long way in recent years, largely in response to tighter controls but also due to improved materials and design.

Yet strangely, while most people think nothing of lighting a gas flame, they hesitate when it comes to burning logs. Perhaps because the emissions are more visible with wood smoke and of course it’s quite clearly a dead tree. But the interesting thing is that although burning wood does release carbon dioxide, growing another tree will soak back up the same amount – hence there is no net CO2 gain.

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 absorbs from the atmosphere pretty much the same quantity of CO2 as will be released again when it is burnt.

In simple terms, this represents a balanced, neutral cycle of carbon dioxide capture and release. Completely the opposite of what happens with fossils fuels where the CO2 flow is one way only.

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.

So it’s easy to see how the future looks assured for the good old wood burning stove, with not a little help from both legislation intended to increase its appeal and the sheer number of people choosing to adopt it.

For those able to make use of woodburners, this technology provides a comparatively (compared to oil and gas) cheap way of providing heat and hot water. However, it is not fully scalable and not anyway an answer to all our present problems. It is however not about to slip quietly into the history books any time soon.

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

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