I have been saying this for 25 years, taken a lot of flack over it too.

In our small village, many people have woodburners or fireplaces, meaning I have to turn off my MVHR to avoid it sucking in air that makes the whole place smell like a campfire.
Even with these new standards I expect wood burning to rise to the top spot of domestic pollution generators pretty soon.

Where are distant upwind vapours coming from, clearly they are massively increased in country

Posted By: WillInAberdeenThey could have examined the pros/cons of the upcoming EU 'ecodesign’ smoke reduction standard, supposedly intended to improve on the existing DEFRA smokeless certificates by 80%; or the upcoming ban on under-seasoned firewood and bagged coal; or compared SE England with other parts of UK in terms of smoke and traffic emissions. They could have discussed that a properly insulated house doesn't need a multi-kW room heating stove. They could have discussed that air pollution in the UK is now a small fraction of what it was a few decades ago, a huge success. They could have looked at whether the electric vehicle target will reduce pm2.5 or not. But that would have made their story too complicated!

Indeed! While this release has its 'heart in the right place' i.m.o. there's a distinct lack of big picture consideration here.

How does well seasoned local wood compare to an old oil boiler? What happens when you look beyond direct particulates at the oil extraction (potentially from tarsands), building pipelines/infrastructure (though wilderness), shipping (than rinses it's pollution into the sea) and climate change...

Coal is also relegated to the further down and there's no real differentiation between open-fires and stoves. There's a world of difference between an open coal fire (which is still depressingly common) and a modern wood burner with seasoned wood.

There seems to be the potential here for single issue campaigners to prioritise the local health (of the relatively affluent from a global perspective) over world wide health.

That said I'd agree that those in cities should be doing all they can to avoid burning wood and add in coal, diesel & petrol too.

Posted By: tonyWhere are distant upwind vapours coming from, clearly they are massively increased in country

Good question. Water vapour? What vapours are there that are not organic and also aren't dusts or aerosols etc?
edit: CO2?

What's the big gap in the graph at Edinburgh?

Posted By: WillInAberdeenIt's the Firth of Forth.

Ah, thanks. I had somehow got the idea that graphs were some kind of average perpendicular to the line of transection, but now I see they're just point measurements. I would expect sea salt to be at least as high over the Firth of Forth as it is over the land adjacent?

I haven't found any Imperial source document to back up these graphs. Not giving references should be a crime.

Posted By: Cliff PopeThe Guardian testers must have selected stoves and fireplaces with very poor chimneys.
We don't get a rush of gases into the room when we open the Rayburn door to put more wood on - quite the opposite. The chimney draught sucks in more air.

Were the same- open the door or either air control and the fire takes off up the flue like a jet on afterburners. I cant for the life of me see how anything gets out of the fire when its burning. Maybe the problem is with dust from the ash tray??

Posted By: Cliff PopeThe Guardian testers must have selected stoves and fireplaces with very poor chimneys.

Presume you mean this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/18/wood-burners-triple-harmful-indoor-air-pollution-study-finds

If so the tripling is quite believable. We sometimes smell wood smoke when refilling a stove (even with a good draw due to turbulence etc.) and that's before you get into starting it and dust burning off on the outside etc.

The things to look deeper at would be the variability of the data (e.g. could it be down to a couple of poor performing stoves?), where the baseline came from and how 'tripling' compares to other sources in indoor air pollution, cooking on gas, frying food, burning a candle...

If you can smell it then you have particulates too and the smaller they are the more dangerous.

Slightly OT sorry, but I found the reduction in pm2.5 emissions in the UK is really impressive and encouraging:

1970: 500 kt/a
2018: 100 kt/a
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/864778/trends_in_air_emissions_2018.csv/preview

The air is now much cleaner than it used to be, so it's surprising that the press coverage about air quality is mostly pretty negative.

More generally, we tend to hear news reports mostly about environmental doom, and the cost and difficulty of cleaning up, but the tremendous success in cleaning up our air emissions should give people encouragement that we can actually improve on other emissions too. The decarbonisation of electricity is another encouragement.

What would be interesting Will, would be an international comparison.

It seems every so often there will be some article or other about the dangers of wood burning stoves that pops up in the press. Yes, there are problems with burning wood but if the wood is dry (below 20%) and the stove properly installed then maintained the negatives are very much reduced.

The main problem that should be addressed but isn't is not the heat source but rather the need for one. If houses were properly built and maintained then the need for extra heating would be minimal. Of course this would mean proper control of the standard of construction which is not going to happen.

May not apply to all stoves but with ours theres definitely a right a wrong way to open the doors. Our stove has 2 doors with the outer door closing over the inner door so the inner door is held shut by the outer one. Open the outer door and nothing comes out of the stove so theres no smell when refuelling through just the one door. If we open the second door there is always a puff of smoke as the door is opened. Once its opened the draw up the flue resumes and nothing more spills out, that we can detect!

Posted By: JontiIt seems every so often there will be some article or other about the dangers of wood burning stoves that pops up in the press. Yes, there are problems with burning wood but if the wood is dry (below 20%) and the stove properly installed then maintained the negatives are very much reduced.

Even with the negatives very much reduced, domestic biomass stoves are major polluters as documented here:
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/library/reports?report_id=935

Posted By: JontiIt seems every so often there will be some article or other about the dangers of wood burning stoves that pops up in the press. Yes, there are problems with burning wood but if the wood is dry (below 20%) and the stove properly installed then maintained the negatives are very much reduced.

That's true but the difficulty is that only using dry unpainted untreated wood relies on all the users choosing to be responsible, and that never happens. Indeed getting all wood stoves propely installed and then maintained has exactly the same difficulty. Some people are good and try to look after the planet; others aren't and don't. Legislation can help sometimes but not everywhere, short of an outright ban.

The main problem that should be addressed but isn't is not the heat source but rather the need for one. If houses were properly built and maintained then the need for extra heating would be minimal. Of course this would mean proper control of the standard of construction which is not going to happen.

Agreed 100%, sadly.