Is Wood Burning The Future For Heating Technology?

While the wood burning stove doesn’t sound even remotely futuristic, there are in fact many simple yet compelling reasons why this apparent relic of the past is poised to re-emerge as an important heating technology in the years ahead.

Wind back to the early development of Philadelphia over two and a half centuries ago when a quickly growing population brought about a severe shortage of wood. Luckily, one of America’s best known inventors at the time (Benjamin Franklin) had taken up residence in the city and designed a brand new “circulating wood stove” to tackle the issue.

This new stove was orders of magnitude more efficient than a conventional open fire, which meant quite simply that a lesser amount of wood was required which in turn substantially eased the extra demand for this limited resource. The initial design was subsequently improved with a front door, to seal and even better manage the airflow, and it remained effectively unchanged for the following two hundred or so years.

By the time the 1970s rolled around, a familiar story resurfaced; the oil crises of that time 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 started to reconsider wood burners given the readily accessible 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.

The wood stove continued comfortably along in this new enhanced form, but remained a decidedly small player in the heating technology world. That was until oil depletion and climate change started creeping up the global agenda. Certainly the escalating price of oil at first drove this new resurgence in the popularity of the humble wood burner, but concern about carbon footprints was also becoming a factor.

The thing is that wood burning uses a renewable energy supply (trees) and can also be in effect neutral as regards CO2 pollution. Trees have to have two major inputs: CO2 which they absorb from the air and solar energy (sunlight). From these they build carbon (i.e. wood) and release the now redundant oxygen back to the atmosphere.

All that is necessary to clean up the CO2 released by burning the wood from a tree is to grow yet another tree. It really is as simple as that and for that reason, although it will probably never become a predominant heating technology, woodburning is most likely to be with us for quite some time yet. Think of it as a form of solar energy that can help clean CO2 from the atmosphere while the fuel grows.

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