apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

When I read this I first felt a feeling of dismay, having a wonderful wood burning fireplace myself, but in reality a gas fireplace is much safer, cleaner (in all ways), and efficient. I think it's a good move.

A gas fireplace is NOT cleaner in all ways - it produces more greenhouse gases.

A 2003 Australian study on greenhouse gas emissions from domestic wood fires showed that burning wood creates up to 10 times fewer greenhouse gas emissions per unit of heat than other sources. The Australian Greenhouse Office has the following figures for carbon produced by heating methods (per heat unit):

Natural gas produces 0.31 kg.
LPG gas produces 0.34 kg.
Heating Oil produces 0.39 kg...
Electricity Aust. Average 1.00 kg...
Wood produces 0.00 kg.

People should replace *open* fires, which are inefficient in heating terms, and which produced particulate emissions, with fan-forced combustion heaters, which greatly reduce particulate emissions, not with gas fires which come with huge (if less visible to the average consumer than the wood smoke) problems of their own.

sad...there are so many other battles to fight. I'm sure there are many environmentalists that have fireplaces.

The Australian study was very superficial and ignored methane from burning wood.

A Scandinavian study did much more detailed research and measured emissions from a range of stoves. Those measurements showed that a smoky wood stove can cause twice as much global warming just from methane emissions as heating two similar houses with oil. That's on top of the toxic fine particle pollution - more than would be emitted by 200 passenger cars.

Wood stoves also increase global warming because neighbours are forced to move out of town to avoid the smoke from other peoples' stoves (many doctors recommend this) and drive long distances to work. Other neighbours have to increase electricity use to run fans and filters, drive to doctor’s surgeries to get treatment for illnesses caused by wood smoke, and dry clothes indoors because they smell like a cigarette factory if hung outside on the washing line.

For the sake of our health and the climate, we should all fall out of love with fireplaces. But that doesn't mean we can't use wood as a renewable fuel. Domestic stoves may cause more global warming than oil or gas, but combined heat and power stations (cogeneration or trigeneration) are designed for high, temperature efficient burning and can be fitted with filters so that they can heat and power 100 houses for the same pollution as 1 domestic wood stove.

The real battle is ignorance. If people knew that even the new EPA-certified wood stoves emit as much toxic fine particle pollution as 100 cars, hardly anyone would use them. No need to argue, just work together to save the planet!

I love seeing fireplaces.
In the UK where I stay the higher end homes still have them.

We recently completed a job and the fireplace place was huge.
If you go to our site
http://www.professionalpainter.co.uk

The video shows a job we recently completed,it has said fireplace in it.
The ceilings are 10.5ft approx so you can gauge how grand the fireplace is.

This site is a great find I look forward to the weekly newsletters.

Thank you.

From
Mark In Aberdeen Scotland (where the weather is always cold!)

I'm looking at an apartment right now in downtown montreal. Like many, it has a fireplace that I won't be able to use. Kind of upsetting.