Suffolk Bans Outdoor Wood-Burning \"Furnaces\"

Christian Egli_2

The stupid way is always the worst choice

Trespassing smoke is something to be dealt with zoning boards - everything is already in place. Go set yourself up in heavy industrial zone and you can send all the smoke, vibration and noise onto your neighbors. If you're in the medium industrial zones you may only send stuff off into your zone boundaries. Lastly, in light industrial zone everything has to remain within your property limits.

This goes on with increasing protectiveness through commercial areas up into the most pampered residential zone. It goes for all sorts of other stuff too, like noise, commerce, lighting...

My point is, whatever disagreement there may be between neighbors, it should already be solvable with the existing zoning laws. Adding boiler police to monitor fuel moisture is most intrusive. Either the zoning rules are a waste and should be repealed, or, we don't need boiler bans. This is just a gimmick to trick us into more government and more lost freedom. The coasts are falling into the oceans.

Next, we'll be stuck in fear trying to impossibly prove the negative that all our boilers are indeed not polluting rather than simply suing a neighbor for stinking up the whole neighborhood. (Rather than suing, I think just talking and explaining is already a good starting point)



What would I talk about?

Easy. Cutting wood and refilling the outdoor machine is a huge job. Handling the tons of wood is a back breaking task - no one can deny this. This makes the wood we shove into those ovens a very expensive fuel, OK, not on a solid cash basis, but the expense is there nonetheless and the wood is precious enough to not want to let it escape without burning.

What does the cash look like? Just like logs. Drop one on the foot and it hurts. Turn one into a cloud of uncondensed (but burnable) creosote and it will hurt you to tears watching that hard cut wood leaving your stack as a cloud of unburned fuel. Smoke makes me cry.

You further need to scrape loads of soot from the flue passages? What do you think that is? It's plainly the carbon essence of wood all concentrated into black stuff. Hard work to put into the boiler, hard work to scrape out.

Those clouds of smoke and other unburned wood are costing the boiler operator a huge amount of work.

Think a cloud of pure C carbon and CO carbon dioxide weighs nothing compared to a cord of wood? think again. A bunch of us posted on that topic a little while ago. Check it out.

Ponderous word diets

The same link

http://forums.invision.net/Thread.cfm?CFApp=2&&Message_ID=324272&_#Message324272

Old time coal boiler operators would be furious about the way we operate most outdoor wood boilers. Reading the way fuel efficiencies were obsessed about more than fifty years ago leaves us today with not much to be proud of (and most of what was done in the near sixties and seventies is truly an embarrassing shame).

To get good wood burning, you imperatively need a bunch of things:

** Draught - must have a forced fan

This used to be provided by solid brick and mortar stacks. This was cheap, easy and efficient. Today, electric fan draught does the trick with equal performance and huge convenience. Since solid stacks are not often an option, forced draught is a must. Unaided metal stacks do nothing to help - they have no mass and thus no draught except for when the fire is raging.

** Keep combustion hot hot hot - must have a brick fire chamber

Shovel wielding coal stokers would get kicked for keeping fuel doors open. This cools the fire and stops emerging gasses from burning. That's how you smoke. Getting hot for fire is impossible in a cold water wall metal fire chamber, thus, getting full combustion is impossible without fire chamber walls lined with refractory ceramic. The water wall can be behind all this, and you can extract the heat from the flue passages well enough downstream of the complete fire. Good oil burning boilers do the same, they have lined fire pots.

Don't spend your money on anything not refractory lined, boiler or plain indoor stove. Gasification units are a fancy way of doing this, but the old coal burning stoves (brick lined) did it all just as well and without any complication.

** Control - must have primary and secondary air schemes

Wood burns in two folds, first it burns at the log all the while it outgasses a lot. Most of the wood is first converted into gas. This gas then needs to burn itself, this happens above the fire bed and requires air again. Feed no secondary air and you get lots of unburned gasified wood leaving your smoke stack. A wasted shame.

Control the amount of fire you want with the below the grate primary air shutter. Control the zero smoke with the secondary air shutter usually set in the fuel loading door. You need both. The two tasks are not similar at all and cannot be done from one shutter alone. No matter what brochures say. This also means you need a grate...

You can't either shut both air supplies and hope for the fire to go into suspension. A smolder will only let you see your wood leave up the flue without rendering much of any heat. If you have the primary air, you can throttle that one, and then still play with the secondary air to fully burn whatever minimal amount of wood will burn. Close the secondary air and get smoke.

**

There, isn't it all very easy to get the max out of the wood we so painfully harvest? Doing anything less is not worth it.

Equipped this way, it is totally possible to burn anything (including some moderately wet wood) without any smoke at all and without ever blackening the inside of the boiler or the flue passage. Total combustion.

No smoke. No cleaning the flue. Less wood to burn. Less ashes to remove. Happy neighbors. Where's the down side? It only takes the careful purchase of the good product. Price is not even the issue here, they're all over the place.

Farm shows have huge assortments of wood burning equipment and it's fun to go pet the cows alongside the boilers.

I operate one old residential coal stove on wood and all my secret junk mail and with good draught I produce no smoke at all and no smell. It hasn't needed any flue sweep in years. It's easy. Also, as a company we used to have a tremendous client with huge stand-inside wood burning boilers filled with... burning hot oil, not steam... ... We provided adjustments, equipment and repairs.

**

Now, who's against the smell of barbecue? Hmmmm, the smell of kerosene lighter fluid always puts me in the mood for air travel.

Glenn Sossin_2

Don't tell anyone

So whats next, you can only use your fireplace on certain days of the week- maybe when the kids are not in school ?

And if the high relative humidity and fog can't start a fire. These lawmakers need to find some other pet project.

This is a wheel barrow fuel of BS

realolman

I actually don't

have issues with my neighbors... none of them have a wood boiler. I hope it stays that way.

You seem bound and determined to blame the lack of consideration on the wrong people. The people with the wood boiler spewing smoke are the problem... not the people who don't have it, but have to breathe it.


I have lived here 28 years... how about articulating some reasons why I should be compelled to breathe someone else's stink?