Desperate Homeowners Destroy Air Quailty Trying To Heat Homes With Smokey Boilers

Thick smoke from outdoor wood burning heating system polluting the air in New York valley.
Elaine Meinel Supkis

Due to the high cost of fossil fuels, increasing numbers of Americans are installing tremendously smoky outdoor wood-burning heating devices. This is degrading the air quality very rapidly in my own community, for example. Bolivia just nationalized all energy reserves, and got new contracts which upped the amount of money paid to the state from a miserable $200 million a year to a more reasonable $4 billion a year. Also, Russia used energy as a diplomatic tool with Georgia.

These new boiler systems are springing up rapidly all over the place as desperate Americans struggle to make ends meet.

The Classic can be located up to 500 feet away from the home or building being heated.
Heated water from the Classic is pumped to the home or building through insulated, underground ThermoPEX piping - the most efficient way to move heat over distances.
The Classic is designed to work with any existing heating system. A heat exchanger or direct circulation conveys the heat into a forced-air furnace, radiant baseboard, or radiant floor heating system. This gives you normal thermostatic temperature control.
The Classic can provide heat for all your domestic hot water by adding a water-to-water heat exchanger. You can turn off your hot water heater and save $30 to $80 or more per month!

Here is what this system looks like. One fills the stove with wood and it burns off and on all day. It goes full-blast when heating up the water or air and burns fairly cleanly. But once the water is heated up, the thermostat shuts off the air intake and the wood then smolders until the water cools or more hot air is needed to heat up the building and then the vents open and the oxygen causes the fire to shoot up in temperature and the smoke decreases as the burning is more efficient.

Click on images to enlarge
In reality, the minute these noxious machines cut the oxygen to the wood pile burning inside, it immediately begins to smoke like crazy. As one can see from this photo, the smoke is quite obvious.

When we had only a very few of these horrible systems in the narrow valley, it was already from day one, quite noticable, the deterioration in air quality. As each family installs these systems, they are springing like toadstools after a storm, the air quality has taken a nose dive. The whole village of Berlin smells of smoldering wood, every morning, when we get the nighttime air inversions when colder air settles down by the streams, it is very hazy.

Asthma is going to shoot way up here. Instead of living in the idyllic countryside, most families will be living in the equivelent of a forest fire 24/7. On very windy days, the smoke is carried off before it can sicken anyone but we have many still nights where it builds up in the valleys.

For 30 years, we had the Clean Air Act and when everyone rushed to install woodstoves during the first energy crisis, the EPA passed strong laws improving the technology of woodstoves. Each year, until the last three years, they got better and better. My newest wood stove is very good indeed. It burns very efficiently and even when I start it, it produces nearly no smoke and when I bank it down at night, it produces very little smoke.

But now we have allowed Bush and his gang to throw aside these laws and in order to allow huge energy burning systems to pollute the planet, they have allowed homeowners to do the same. If 50% of the people in Berlin end up using these high-pollution systems, it will become nearly uninhabitable in the valley. I live above the valley on the mountainside, above the cold air zone so none of this smoke reaches my house. But if I go to the bottom of my driveway, the air is distinctly worse. I can't imagine anyone living next to these things but there seems to be no protest in them polluting the air.

It is a matter of time. Relentlessly, these will proliferate. And children will begin to die, the elderly will gasp for air and everyone will stay inside, hoping their windows and doors keeps out the bad air and so it goes: trying to find an easy way to be comforatable degrades the environment for everyone.

Bolivia is showing Americans how to do things.

LA PAZ (AFP) -- In a victory for leftist President Evo Morales, the Bolivian government has reached agreements with all foreign oil and gas companies operating in the country on ways to nationalize the gas industry.

"With these contracts, we will resolve the problem of social injustices and will avoid public unrest in the future," an elated Morales said in a speech on Saturday. "We will assert out rights to our natural resources without expelling anybody or expropriating any property."

The deals will allow the left-wing government to move ahead with its nationalization plans for the gas industry that is expected to bring in additional revenue to fight poverty.

Bolivia's share of the profits from natural gas exploration will increase from $200 million a year to about $4 billion, according the president.

Instead of getting control of our energy systems, we have given up our own power increasingly to mega-corporations that won't even pay feeble amounts of money for the energy. Just recently, the government gave up going to court to enforce contracts with oil giants. So they get away with pumping billions of dollars of oil and gas without paying the government hardly anything at all. This is the way they do business: they take over governments and then exploit the people for vast profits for themselves. Why Americans tolerate this baffles me. It is beyond stupid.

The minute Russia nationalized their energy systems, they began to pull out of bankruptcy and failing social services and life is rapidly improving there, too.

By ALEX NICHOLSON, AP Business Writer 35 minutes ago
MOSCOW - Russia's state-controlled natural gas monopoly said Thursday that it would more than double the price it charges Georgia, further heightening tensions between the ex-Soviet neighbors.

The Georgian foreign minister said the price hike was the cost of his nation's turning away from Moscow and toward the West.

OAO Gazprom said in a statement that it will charge $230 per 35,314 cubic feet of gas, compared with the $110 that it charges now. The announcement signaled Russia's continued recalcitrant stance even as Georgian Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuashvili visited Moscow in the hope of easing relations between Moscow and Tbilisi.

Not only are the Russian people benefitting from nationalization, they can now use energy as a diplomatic tool. Right now, it is the other way around: we are used by energy companies and they dictate to us, what our diplomacy will do and what our plans are for war and the energy companies wanted control of the profits of Iraqi oil which is sold to Europe and Asia. So they got richer and more powerful and America is much weaker and poorer since we are footing the insanely high bill for all this: $350 billion and shooting for the moon!

So we lose on every front. We can't afford the oil we are pumping here at home so homeowners are now polluting the air, trying to stay warm, and the energy companies get all the profits from this and all the expensive wars we are waging on their behalf and the bills haven't even begun to be due. All of this is in the form of IOUs and the oil companies are determined to never pay taxes for all this, either.

We better learn from Russia, Venezuela and Boliva! Before it is too late.

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Comments

[DaliWood]

Other nations are leading where we are failing. Canadian cities are trying to get EPA to do something about the pollution from coal-fired power plants making its way north.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2006/2006-11-01-03.asp

I doubt if they can accomplish much, but the snub they'll get from the Bush Admin. will become one more factor deepening our isolation from rational governments around the world.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

They get some of the pollution but thanks to the jet stream, the NE gets hammered.

[Mary Rozenberg]

Other nations are failing to provide safe, clean affordable energy as well. Thank you Elaine for putting the OWB story together here. You may be interested in linking to our website, that has further information about the OWB public health catastrophe.

However, I disagree with your premise about the success of the EPA clean wood stove campaign. There is an overwhelming body of scientific information that describes the health effects and
societal costs of domestic wood burning even in new wood stoves. Please see http://burningissues.org and our sister sites in Australia, Canada, and England for more infomation about the highly toxic and invisible pollution that even new certified wood stoves produce.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

No woodburning stoves in cities. I live in the country and have an extensive forest and no one can deliver fuels in winter, I live way up on my mountain. Thus, burning hardwoods is tolerable. The density of population is extremely low. Just like people in northern Norway or Finland, there are places it is OK and makes economic sense especially when coupled with a total passive solar energy house like the one I built.

When it is below zero in winter and the sun is shining, I burn 0% fuels.

So it is a combination of everything. Ii hope the technology of stoves continues to improve. It has STALLED out right now thanks to the Feds ignoring air pollution.

[heating]

If you have looked into solar energy as a method for heating your home, panels are usually the first things that come up. There are, however, other unique methods.

The Solar Heating Aspect You Have Never Heard of Before

The power of the sun is immense. The energy in one day of sunlight is more than the world needs. The problem, of course, is how does one harness this power. Solar panels represent the obvious solution, but they have their downside. First, they can be expensive depending upon your energy needs. Second, they do not exactly blend in with the rest of your home.

Passive solar heating represents a panel free method of harnessing the inherent energy found in the sun for heating purposes. If you come out from a store and open the door of your car in the summer, you understand the concept of passive solar heating. A wide variety of material absorbs sunlight and radiates the energy back into the air in the form of heat. Passive solar heating for a home works the same way as the process which overheats your car in the parking lot.

[Build Outdoor Fireplace]

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