Is it green to heat with wood?

As a manufacturer we receive questions from users of wood burning appliances. Often the questions come from those who are not used to burn wood or who are in their first experiment. One of the concerns of these users is the ecological side of wood heating. For your convenience, we have prepared a text from the blog of Ms. Erika Howsare sharing her experience with wood burning. Enjoy your reading!

Many people burn wood in an outdoor boiler that powers a radiant heat system, in which hot water moves through tubing just under the floors of their houses. Others use a more traditional freestanding wood stove or furnace.

Some people consider this a sustainable way to heat the house, though not everyone would agree. There are a lot of different considerations. For one thing, the fuel itself is local and renewable. Sometimes you'll even find people wanting to give away wood from trees that have come down on their property. Local tree services are sometimes looking to get rid of wood; some will even bring their extras to your house, if they're in the neighborhood. Finally, your own property might have some downed wood that you can gradually collect.

So sometimes, no trees are expressly cut down for the purpose of heating a house, which makes people feel good about. If everyone heated with wood, though, it would be a scarcer resource and we'd have a much harder time finding castoffs.

Transporting the wood is another consideration. People do make truck trips to haul firewood, but if they were to heat with electricity or gas, it'd just be outsourcing that transport to an energy company. Then there's the prep work: some people split all the wood by hand...while others use a gas-powered splitter.

A bigger issue, of course, is the burning of wood itself. Yes, it releases particulates; yes, a city full of wood-burning boilers would be an unpleasant place. But in the country, especially if your boiler is efficient and produces very little smoke or if your heating appliance is EPA certified, it is considered an sustainable way to heat a house. As for the carbon emissions, the theory goes like this: Trees decomposing would release that carbon anyway (though more slowly), so burning wood is technically carbon-neutral and therefore a green way to heat your home.

To read the original Blog, click here.