Biomass stove
Last updated Wednesday 30 April 2008
A handsome addition to your energy savings
Demand for biomass stoves - or wood burners - is on the up. An attractive wood burning stove can save 1,000kg of CO2 a year - more if you switch your whole central heating system to biomass - and be the focal point of your room. You might watch it more than the TV!
Installation expense and storage are the obstacles. Stoves range from £150 to £1,500, with installation costing as much as £1,500 on top of that. Unless you buy seasoned logs they need to be dried for at least a year to burn effectively, so you'll need plenty of space.
Read more below
Saves up to 1,000kg of CO2 a year
168 Bloomers are doing this
CO2 reduction 
Cheapness 
Popularity
Cost £2,500
In this article:
What is it?
Pub Fact
- 47% of Scotland, 40% of England and 10% of Wales is covered in woodland
- There are around 3,100 million trees in Great Britain
- Coniferous trees such as Pine are known as gymnosperms
- A cubic metre of wood stores roughly 800kg CO2
- As trees grow they naturally absorb CO2 from the atmosphere
Biomass stoves burn wood - either logs or waste sawdust and woodchips compressed into burnable pellets - but 'biomass' can actually refer to any fuel derived from living or recently dead material - plant matter or even cow dung.
Fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) are considered a non-renewable source of energy because these deposits, packed with carboncompounds, take millions of years to form. UK wood from sustainable forests, on the other hand, is considered renewable because although CO2 is released when it's burnt, trees are constantly being replanted and absorb a similar amount as they grow.
How will it make a difference?
Replacing all fossil fuels with biomass will reduce CO2 emissions by up to 90%, but topping up your heating with a stove will still save a massive 1,000kg a year. Plus, the biomass for wood stoves is often timber industry waste that would otherwise need to be disposed of elsewhere.
What's the debate?
In many developing countries where wood is the main source of fuel, forest resources are now scarce or dwindling. Controversial new research even links wood burning stoves in developing countries to increasing climate change.
Wood is regarded as a sustainable fuel source in Britain, because the forestry industry currently plants more trees than it chops down. In many tropical countries forests are scarce or dwindling due to deforestation. To add to this, they grow much more slowly than our forests, taking hundreds of years to regenerate their original biodiversity.
How do I do it?
- A biomass stove will need to be installed by a professional. Get the advice of a good plumber/heating engineer and make sure your installer is approved by HETAS
- Search for a stove supplier via the Log Pile website and identify a model suitable for your needs - a nine kilowatt stove will heat the average living room. Some even qualify for the a grant from the Low Carbon Building Programme (LCBP)
- Check if you live in a 'smoke free zone' to make sure the stove complies with the Clean Air Act. This restricts air pollution other than CO2. Find out which stoves you can still use in 'smoke free zones'
- Make sure your installation complies with safety and building regulations
- If you have a chimney, make sure it's lined and have it swept at least once a year
- Find a fuel supplier with BigBarn and purchase seasoned wood by volume rather than weight, as even with seasoned wood much of the weight is water
- You can use any wood, as long as it's not painted or treated, but buy local wood from sustainable sources and not tropical hard wood
- Learn how to spilt wood
- If you're feeling even more ambitious, of course, you could opt for the full shebang and get biomass central heating
What's stopping me?
"Lighting a fire first thing each day sounds like a pain"
Unless you go for the whole biomass central heating sytem, the stove is basically backing up your existing heating, so you're not depending on it. In any case, the most efficient stoves will keep burning very slowly overnight, so your house is still warm in the morning.
"I don't have a chimney!"
Not a problem. When your stove and boiler are put in, you will just need to have a flue (a vent) installed through your outside wall.
"I don't see myself as the axe-wielding type"
You don't need to be. You can buy pellets or logs ready-chopped to the desired size.
"But I love my open fire"
Open fires are only 25% efficient and so waste most of the energy they create, but stoves are around 80% efficient - and you still get a good view of the wood being burned.
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Brian Wilson comments on the release of micro particulates (fine particles) from wood stoves. While most stoves produced in the UK do release particles, the USA has introduced legislation to have catalytic converters fitted to their stoves, these can be purchased in the UK. The down side to a cat, is that as the stove needs to run hot for the cat to work, these stoves rarely have a boiler of any real capacity fitted. Wood burning stoves have a place in the scheme of things, especially when the wood burnt would otherwise go to landfill or be burnt on a bonfire. Think positively and smile more! Every day in some little way I get a little greener.
Do NOT try burning sawdust in a woodburning stove! It is too fine and extinguish the fire. Worse it can smoulder which releases the distillates in the wood, without burning them and they are probably worse pollutants than the CO2 released.
The bulk of timber waste is softwood, which burns very fast and is inefficient. The best wood for stoves are hardwoods, ash being the best, but they take much longer to grow. I seriously question the statistics for these stoves.
We finished building our new house last year, it's in a semi rural setting with a resonable supply of wood available. I installed a 16kW wood burner with a wrap around boiler, this is connected in the return from the radiators before it enters the condensing gas boiler. A pump is fitted to the wood burner with a thermostat that cuts in when the water gets hotter than C.H. return. A by pass is fitted to the combi boiler to allow the water from the wood burner to by pass when the combi is not on.
The outcome is that on cold,not freezing days, the wood burner heats the radiators, when I get up in the morning the gas has heted the house, I light the fire and the gas cuts off on the combi boiler thermostat, gas saved, warm house to get up to.I know that the CORGI guys out there will not like the system and the stove makers wouldn't be too pleased, but it works, and how it works!
Biomass stoves are not readily available in stores around the world. I don't recommend burning wood to create a heating system, though it might lower the cost it nevertheless is one of the factors for chopping down of trees - resulting in deforestation.
Very concerned that emissions from biomass boilers contain levels of most hazardous pollutants fine particles, higher than oil and far higher than gas. There are in excess of 2000 peer reviewed studies linking exposure to particle pollution and consequent health problems and deaths with no safe level and WHO consider this the worst air pollutant and the EU have ratified a directive to reduce the existing level of air pollution. Biomass combustion produces fine particles mainly in the most dangerous size spectrum below PM2.5, straw apparently 80% submicron which allows access to the bloodstream. Biomass systems are known to be some 30,000 times dirtier than equivalent gas. CO2 is benign but sadly fine particles are deadly.
© MMIX
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