Wood heat in a shop

I built one like these.

Mine is set up a bit different. I used a 275 drum, then double walled the bottom and installed fire brick. The double walls extend to the top of the sides. Also used some steel to make a baffle that channels the smoke to the end of the stove, then up over the tubes and out to a second heat exchanger. Then out the chimney. Heats a 30X40 with 12' walls just fine. Plus with an add-on I burn waste oil as available.

My first one used the cast door kit from Vogelzang because I had one. Worked OK but the size was restrictive. Built the next door out of some

1/4" plate and reinforcements. Worked much better. Also added a small fan on the air inlet to give a faster start-up from cold.

Ya, sure thing, Dan....

Well it only makes sense. We can't have too many wood burning heaters running all winter because of the pollution. At the same time we can't have folks freezing and pipes freezing in the winter in homes where the people are already living with small incomes. I argue with myself about whether to burn wood. Electricity that I use comes partly from fossil fuels. Propane is also a fossil fuel. But I am growing wood faster than I burn it so if I burn wood I will put less carbon in the air than if I use electricity or propane for heat. On the other hand I also put bad particulates into the air when burning wood. Eric

Until we get fusion, we burn fossil fuels or (better) use reactors. If we use reactors which can burn the spent fuel, so much the better.

You realize the utter _bullshit_ of that statement, don't you? You're growing trees anyway, so the use of propane would be much, much better for the ecology. BANK on it.

At rates many orders of magnitude larger, too.

And much more:

(Crom, I hate quoting from econazi sites, but, occasionally, they're actually right on the money.)

Greetings Larry, It is debateable whether burning fossil fuels or wood is ultimately the better solution when it comes to greenhouse effects. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon into the environment, and energy too, that was sequestered thousands or millions of years ago. Burning vegetable matter and releasing CO2 at a rate slower than it absorbs as it grows does not add to the net carbon in the air or the heat of the planet. But unless burned in a proper power plant with scrubbers that remove everything except CO2, vegetable matter burning can and does contribute all sorts of particulates and other bad stuff to the air. Eric

What about a catalytic converter?

HowDEE!

I figured any debate was over when I looked at the difference in pollution between the two, with wood and coal so -much- higher than any (other) fossil fuel. ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE different. Wood stoves up to 400x the pollutants of nat gas/propane. It isn't rocket surgery.

Who brainwashed you to think along this line? (Sorry, but that's the way I see it.)

I'm thinking we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

If I only burn plants that growing now then I'm not adding to the total carbon in the environment. But if I burn fossil fuels then I am adding to the carbon in the environment. The environment being the surface of the earth where everything lives. Or am I wrong. And if so please point out where I'm making a misteak. Eric

^^^^^^^

Right there

The mistake in the sentence is the last word. Meant as a pun. I'm glad someone got it. Eric

Remember too, in your green frenzy, that exhaling adds carbon to the environment..... Perhaps less breathing?

I'm not having a green frenzy. And besides, I'm sure my farts contribute to the greenhouse effect much more than the CO2 I exhale. But how about you answer the question? If I'm wrong in my statements correct me. Eric

The steak is missing where you think putting pollution into the air where is WAS on the ground is OK while taking it from under the ground is not OK. It's the same to me. Cutting down a tree removes if from taking CO2 from the air and producing oxygen. Then you want to burn it, on top of that?

So, using a fuel (wood) which is four hundred times more polluting than another (propane/natgas), while being -aware- of that difference, seems downright irresponsible. That's where we differ. I don't see folks who do this as having any kind of moral high ground at all.

Growing trees to compensate for our carbon footprint is fine with me, but reducing the amount of our pollution seems to be the best bet yet. I've been an environmentalist since 1969, but refuse to call myself that any more, given the total ecoterrorist makeup of most enviros nowadays. Crikey, what a mess.

And the EPA wants to take the last ten-billionth of a percent of something instead of stopping things which are putting out tens of percents of those ghastly greenhouse gases. Go figure. Me? I take the cuts where they matter most. Like swapping from coal to nuclear power. INSTANT (what, 50%?) decrease in global greenhouse emissions and a metric shitload less heat produced, too.

I'm pretty sure he did that on porpoise, Ig.

The cut down tree will be replaced with another tree, which will absorb carbon when growing.

With stoves, EPA is concerned not with carbon emissions, but with fine particulate emissions (smoke), which are bad for your neighbors' health. This fine particulates is what causes the polluted air horrors in China.

Once I understood what it was all about, it made complete sense to me and I do not think that EPA is on a very wrong track. What it wants is stove designs that burn better and emit less smoke.

i

Only difference between burning a tree and it a natural death and decomposition is that in the latter case, it takes longer for the carbon from a rotting tree to return to the atmosphere, where it is once again available to be taken up by a living tree (or in your case, two)

Even setting aside the fact that planting more trees than you burn enriches the atmospheric ogygen concentration, Larry's argument is bogus unless he can come up with practical method for collecting the carbon that results from burning propane and using it to make more propane with.

But the EPA is not doing all it could to get people to use better stove des igns. The EPA is never going to manage to prevent people from building wo od stoves. And as it is most of those home built stoves will not burn well and will emit a lot of smoke. But if the EPA did some research on wood bu rning and set up some way for people to purchase EPA approved plans for hi gh efficiency wood stoves. Then people would build better stoves and there would be less pollution. In fact if people could purchase a right to buil d a good wood stove at a reasonable price, I think people would replace the poor designed stoves with better stoves.

So I think the EPA is on the wrong track, or at least not the best track.

Dan

[snip]

But if he stopped cutting them and burning them, they'd die, fall down, rot and release all that CO2 back into the atmosphere anyway. And nobody would get the benefit of the heat.

Over the long term, forests left alone* have a net zero contribution to carbon sequestration. The only carbon they can remove from the environment is that removed by a logging truck.

Pretty much the only natural positive carbon sink is a peat bog.

It will take 15-100 years for the new tree to replace the CO2-sucking capabilities of its predecessor. Yes, plant trees, but don't think that a sapling is anything like its senior citizen tree when it comes to cleaning air and producing oxygen.

Pardon my tangent there. I was pointing out the silly things which they're outlawed in industry for the past several decades while not even addressing the things which would make real change happen in lowering the overall national pollution.

Yes, I feel it's time to address the wood smoke pollution. Absolutely. I had trouble breathing today on the trip to my mailbox. I was out of breath and feeling green when I completed the 90 steps due to the leaf burning and woodstoves combined with this inversion layer. Ick!

Overall, the EPA is on an extremely bad track. It will continue to do very little for the environment while running companies out of business and costing humans thousands of times more than it should. I hope their stove regulation changes make good headway into the problem without causing undue strain on the poor. Why doesn't the EPA charge more for recurring fines paid by large corporations who knowingly break the law? The EPA goes after the little guys and charges them a lot more than it does the corps, fer Crom's sake. A guy spills a quart of oil and is fined more than the corp who gassed an entire town, etc. So far, it's considerably cheaper for corps to break laws (and get away with it) rather than update their anti-smog technology with existing fixes. Those fines could pay for new tech where it's needed. Win/Win!