What hurts the environment more, using heat to warm your home, or a wood stove (fireplace)?

Question

What hurts the environment more, using heat to warm your home, or a wood stove (fireplace)?

Answer 1

what kind of heat? oil, gas, solar? there are plenty of option:

from cleanest to dirtest here's what I know

solar (clean but not fully effective)

nayural gas (cleaner but with big price swings)

oil (pretty sooty)

woodfire (pretty dirty and a bit more dangerous and not effective for evenly heating a house)

Answer 2

it almost impossible to heat a whole house with a conventional fire place unless the front is closed off because the warm air from the house will be sucked up the chimney leaving any rooms that don't get radiant heat directly from the fireplace cold.

I use an airtight wood stove in my basement as my primary heat source & burn about 4 or 5 tons of wood in an average winter ( more if its an exceptionally cold winter like this one) I get the wood for free but I have to haul it about 115 miles from my farm so I spend spend around $180 for gasoline & 6 or 7 days cutting it every year. most people dont realize how much wood it takes to heat a house.

if I had to buy the wood it would be much cheaper to turn up the thernostat & heat with natural gas. especially if you dont enjoy the exercise of running a chain saw & splitting logs.

as far as pollution, the wood releases its carbon when it decomposes just the same as when it burns so thats neither a gain or loss.but your not burning fossil fuel so thats a plus envoronmentaly speaking.

with an airtite stove with a thermostaticly controlled 2 inch by 3inch air intake you dont get much smoke once it gets hot as long as your oak or ash has been dead a year or so, as long as you keep it hot smokes not a problem.

heating with wood is only practical if you have a free source of wood & someones home most of the time to keep it burning. but cutting wood is good exercise in the outdoors so thats a plus.

Answer 3

If you burn wood, you are sending CO2 into the atmosphere.  A fireplace is the least efficient wood burner known.  If you must use wood, get an airtight woodstove.

If you heat with electricity from a nuclear reactor, your heat is essentially CO2 free!

Answer 4

The use of wood as a heat can be very effective and good for the environment if one cuts only downed, dead wood. Also trees can be planted to make up for the wood taken. The new trees will help clean the air (from wood smoke) and from other things such as emissions for humans, animals, cars ect. When we use oil or gas, we can not put anything back once it is used it is just gone. Wood is a drier heat and feels warmer to our bodies than oil. or gas.

Answer 5

I can assume that by "heat" you mean a gas furnace.  If that assumption is correct, the the wood is better.  although it produces carbon dioxide also, it is CO2 that is already in the carbon cycle, whereas the gas is from carbon removed by plants from the cycle millions of years ago.  Bringing it back up causes global warming.

Answer 6

Emissions of organic compounds from wood burning in a modern ecolabelled residential boiler (30 kW) were studied. Smoke was collected in the chimney outlet at different times during the burning cycle for subsequent analysis by gas chromatography.

The studied ecolabelled wood boiler had high combustion efficiency, and the flaming phase emissions were very low. The greenhouse gas methane (CH4) was determined in low concentrations of about a few mg m−3 and was the major volatile hydrocarbon emitted. The CH4 emission factor was calculated to 0.04 g kg−1 dry fuel. Benzene, in the range 0.1–1 mg m−3, was the predominant aromatic compound emitted. Other major aromatic compounds were methylbenzene, dimethylbenzenes and ethenylbenzene. The concentrations of the studied polycyclic aromatic compounds were generally low, except for naphthalene, which was the third most prominent aromatic compound. However, the total emissions of these health and environmentally hazardous compounds were low.

The already low emissions of most of the organic compounds decreased further towards the end of the burning cycle, although the concentration of carbon monoxide (CO) increased. This indicates that large CO emissions are not necessarily linked to large emissions of organic compounds. Relative to benzene, the concentrations of many of the aromatic compounds studied were higher in the glowing combustion phase, than in the flaming combustion phase.

The total environmental and health impact of the studied emissions from the ecolabelled boiler is considered to be low. This wood boiler can be recommended as an environmentally sound residential heating alternative.

Answer 7

What people don't seem to realize is that wood is just a storehouse for carbon dioxide. You can release it quickly by burning the wood or slowly by letting it rot. Either way, you are dealing with the same amount. Fossil fuels in the ground do not give up their carbon until they are mined and burned.

Further, the heat that goes up the chimney is the heat produced by the burning unless you are foolish enough to run a fireplace fire while heating with a fossil fuel at the same time.

I heat entirely with an air-starvation stove burning (almost entirely) wood dropped off by a local landscaper. That saves him having to drive it to a landfill and me having to drive to pick it up elsewhere (or having it delivered). The wood is almost all split by hand, saving me the drive to a gym for my exercise. Particulate emission is higher with wood than with other sources of heat. The other waste product, ash, gets used to sweeten the soil or to speed the melting of snow; this year, I've had to shovel snow only once. Granted, I have El Nino to thank for that but the ash still helps.