Wood Burners – Tomorrow’s Heating Technology?

You have to admit that proposing the wood stove as a mainstream heating technology for the 21st Century scarcely seems credible, but follow along and learn why this blast from the past has a rosy future ahead of it.

The initial design of the wood stove dates back to the mid 18th Century and a certain Benjamin Franklin, who lived in the new and fast growing city of Philadelphia. The rate of development was such that there was soon a severe shortfall in firewood supplies which prompted him to invent a device he named the circulating stove.

This new stove was orders of magnitude more effective than a conventional open fire, which meant quite simply that a reduced amount of wood was needed which in turn considerably eased the extra demand for this finite resource. The first design was subsequently improved with a front door, to seal and even better manage the airflow, and it remained effectively unchanged for the subsequent two hundred or so years.

By the time the 1970s rolled around, a familiar story resurfaced; the oil crises of that time period limited 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 began to reconsider wood burners given the readily available and thus cheaper supply of fuel.

However, things didn’t pan out so simply. For a start there were now far more stringent controls on pollution and energy efficiency, so manufacturers set to redesigning key elements and using modern materials. Pretty soon the modern wood burner had heat retaining linings, catalytic converters, automated fuel feed and control systems, and had parked its tanks squarely on the conventional gas boiler’s lawn.

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.

People have hitherto been drawn to burning wood because of the relatively low cost, but there’s more to the story than that. Wood is not only a renewable resource, since you always grow more trees, but it is in effect carbon neutral. Growing a new tree for firewood makes use of two abundant and free ingredients: sunlight and atmospheric carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is converted into carbon (wood) in the shape of the new tree and oxygen as a type of waste product.

Burning wood releases back just the CO2 that was previously removed from the atmosphere by the original tree, and growing a further tree will in turn recover the CO2 discharged by burning. It’s a well balanced CO2 cycle. Not that this is about to transform the world any time soon, but as a heating technology the wood burner unquestionably has a bright future. It is, if you like, a type of delayed action solar energy that conveniently also helps ease CO2 pollution.

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

Tagged with: alternative energy • environment • fuel bills • future • heating • home Improvement • prediction • saving money • technology • wood burner • wood burning stove • wood stove • woodburner

Filed under: home Improvement

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