Scottish Woodburner Ban In New builds

Banned in new builds and conversions.  Though I wonder whether this applies only to builders and homeowners could install after purchase.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24240849.scottish-government-bans-wood-burning-stoves-new-builds/

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/more-limits-on-wood-burning-stoves-will-help-to-cut-air-pollution-2t8prrmtn

Must be off the back of this – while agriculture is the real low hanging fruit for particle emissions, everyone’s scared of farmers at the moment. It seems reasonable to me – the ESS study showed that woodburners pump a lot of particulate matter into indoor spaces which is a real risk to health.

We had the option on our new build 3 years ago but declined. We had 2 wood burners in our old house – it was the dust and smell that was the issue.

Good !

In Shropshire many housing estates are going up with wood burners as standard. Its wrong. If the houses are insulated correctly you wouldnt want or need a log burner.

Fine if the obligation is to insulate to passive house standard too.

Two wood burners is dead dodgy unless they both have independant air supplies from the outside. The draught from one chimney can pull air down the other chimney and draw smells and dust into the house. Worse still is smouldering combustion in one and a fire in the other which can draw CO into the building.

Any forced ventilation needs to be carefully thought out for similar reasons.

I don’t mean, or want, to be argumentative, and I will be probably get flamed for this (see what did there?), but…

I wouldn’t want to live in a place without a wood/multi-fuel burner.

I have one in my Victoria-era terrace, and while the house is as well-insulated as it can be considering its age, I still find the need to use the burner sparingly in winter. The heat it emits is a dry heat that seems to help a great deal with mould and the damp feeling we can get in the house.

But more than this, it provides peace-of-mind. Perhaps it’s just my Canadian-ness coming out, but I hate the idea of the grid going down for some reason, and being unable to heat and/or cook in the home. When Eastern Canada suffered an ice storm in 1998, it brought down the power grid for almost two weeks, and people were forced to gather in neighbours’ homes – those who had fire places – for days, as the temperatures plummeted.

I know that we don’t get those sorts of temperatures in southern Britain, but with global climate change, things are shifting in a colder winter direction, and the idea of having no alternative to whatever the system can provide would make me feel quite vulnerable.

It’s all psychological, I know, but building fires for domestic use seems as if it should be almost a human right.

Anyway, just my two pennies. Feel free to destroy me. 🙂

If the houses are insulated correctly you wouldnt want or need a log burner.

This. A new house built to building regulations simply doesn’t need a cancer stove.

Is there an alternative? An environmentally friendly way to heat your house or a room if you have a power cut?

just a question I don’t have a wood burner and rely solely on electricity to heat the house (ashp).

but with global climate change, things are shifting in a colder winter direction,

The data says the opposite is true. Both cold and warm days are getting warmer in the UK Winter.

A house can always be better insulated. It’s just deciding when to stop. For the extension I’m working on I’ve decided on roof R8, walls R4.5 and floor R3. That’s slightly better than the main house when I renovated. It’ll still need some kind of heating on the coldest days. Passive houses are only passive if you have an energy intensive living style or accept  say 16°C in cold snaps which most people won’t.

A dehumidifier beats damp better than a fire and provides slightly more heat/kW consumed than just plugging in a resistance. A heat pump nad heat recovery ventilation system will also do the job.

No reason for any house with central heating to need a log burner.

I wouldn’t want to live in a place without a wood/multi-fuel burner.

I have one in my Victoria-era terrace, and while the house is as well-insulated as it can be considering its age, I still find the need to use the burner sparingly in winter. The heat it emits is a dry heat that seems to help a great deal with mould and the damp feeling we can get in the house.

Well, you’ve just pissed all over your arguments for a wood burner in new builds yourself there haven’t you. I agree, I wouldn’t want to live in a Victorian house without a burner, but I’d much rather everyone lived in a modern, well insulated house or renovated well-insulated house that stays warm and damp free by means other than burning wood.

I take your point on the off-grid reliability though.

@SaxonRider I know where you’re coming from.  We live in a 200 year old house in a rural spot 900 ft ASL in the Shropshire hills. Our primary heating is via an oil fired boiler.  When it’s sub zero, the central heating struggles a bit without firing up the log burner every now and then. Also, although we have the boiler serviced annually, it has died on us a few times and typically this will happen at the most awkward time, in cold weather at a weekend or over the Christmas break when it’s hard to get an engineer out. In those situations we’d be seriously lost without the log burner.  Not everyone has them just for ornament/fashion.

The heat it emits is a dry heat

what?

things are shifting in a colder winter direction

also you seem to mis-understand the concept of global warming 😂

regardless, absolutely no need for these in a new-build, so this is a step in the right direction IMO.

Winters are certainly not getting colder. Nor are they likely to in the future.

Sounds eminently sensible to me.

New build = properly insulated/proper heating/decent windows/doesn’t leak like a sieve.

In reality, the shoddy enforcement of passably good building standards means that buyers of new builds will most likely end up spending a fortune on electricity to run their badly specced heating and have to watch as their hard earned cash disappears through the roof, walls, doors and windows of their overpriced shoebox…

FWIW, i have a log burner (two actually) as it gets cold here and the power goes out occasionally. For several days at a time. I also have few neighbours and a nice supply of dry wood.

No reason for any house with central heating to need a log burner.

In theory yes. Currently…….

I’m unapologetic in my use of a wood stove. I live super remote so there is no one to ‘asphyxiate’ locally. I’m not an idiot so I’m half reasonable at using a stove and it burning efficiently and cleanly. The wood it burns comes from managed woodland I can see from my window. The alternative I currently have available to me is LPG which is both expensive and a fossil fuel. I’m firmly in the camp that burning logs sourced locally and naturally dried is better environmentally than burning fossil fuels apart from the local pollution issue and in my situation I view that as a low risk problem. Long term when the electricity supplied to my house is all green (ironically the Beauly to Blackhillock SSEN transmission project, europe’s largest pylons linking up the nation’s offshore windfarms for the servicing of you urban folk, will pass less than a km from us) and I have the cash to do the major work to insulate the house better and then saved up  up for an air source heat pump I’ll definitely do it. For now, this is the best I can do.

The heat it emits is a dry heat that seems to help a great deal with mould and the damp feeling we can get in the house.

So does anything without a naked flame, like central heating.

And while I can see the point about some sort of diversity in fuel sources being a good idea:

A) One of those old ceramic gas heaters will do the job just fine for a few days, they’re a bit condensation but you’re only worried about a few days a decade.

B) You live in a terrace, which implies a built up area, which implies you’ll get the power back on as a reasonable priority.

The terrace also means all the pollutants are in a built up area where people breathe them in.

My parents live about 5 miles up the valley from a small hamlet in the middle of nowhere. There the argument makes sense. But even then it’d probably be cheaper these days to fit a battery pack big enough to run the reyburns pumps for a few days than fit a woodburner.

Seems sensible to me.
If a new house is insulated and airtight, with MVHR and air source pump, you are good to go.
Then you are just exposing your household and a few streets around you to harmful particulates, while also dumping carbon and excess heat in the athmosphere.

Now old houses with existing stoves, in rural situations, that is a different kettle of fish. But, and it is a big but, I think even old houses should have to demonstrate lower energy use before a stove install is allowed, with one* allowance for listed property.

(*and of course mcmoonter gets a pass)

It’s all psychological, I know, but building fires for domestic use seems as if it should be almost a human right.

If I was making a list of new human rights – the right to clean air would be above the right to make fire!

@zilog6128 – just as a heads up, global warming isn’t really the term used anymore. Climate scientists tend to use climate change because warming isn’t all that will happen – some places will get colder, some wetter, some drier. While Saxonrider is wrong to state that winters are getting colder (they’re currently getting warmer), in the UK there’s a risk of cold water from melting Arctic ice flowing south and blocking the Gulf Stream, which could see us having much colder winters (remember, we’re on the same latitude as some of Alaska, Canada and Moscow which have much worse winters than we do).

Makes sense to me. Assuming they’ve ignored what’s happened down here, and haven’t rowed back on stiffer insulation regulations for new builds. Gas boilers next… we shouldn’t be building new homes that need or use those either.

in the UK there’s a risk of cold water from melting Arctic ice flowing south and blocking the Gulf Stream

sure, we’ll all be long dead before that happens though (choked by the fumes of all the middle-class numpties with their log burners 😉)

I know that we don’t get those sorts of temperatures in southern Britain, but with global climate change, things are shifting in a colder winter direction, and the idea of having no alternative to whatever the system can provide would make me feel quite vulnerable.

Have a play with this and see where is getting colder in winter in the UK (hint: it is getting milder, not cold)
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/0295557a52b5446595fc4ba6a97161bb

Be more worried about overheating in southern cities for 2 weeks+, flooding regularly, high winds, drought and drinking water shortages, land slip….

thisisnotaspoonFree Member

So does anything without a naked flame, like central heating.

To be fair, ours does seem to dry the house out whereas with the central heating on it just stays warm and damp.

However rather than ‘dry heat’ being the cause, I suspect it’s simply because it pulls fresh air into the house.

Could be wrong but wouldn’t IR be a better bet for helping with mould and damp?

Nah no thanks, I need the direct heat of a stove but I guess I’m an outlier

I think it’s a luxury to have – well insulated should not need one, at all, but if all goes tits up on the energy grid (which is shifting towards just electricity) then it’s feasible to have a resilient source of heating IMO.

Our electricity was off for 8 days following Arwen.

I wouldn’t want to live in a house with only a single source of heat, totally reliant on mains electricity to run everything.

Isn’t the big part of the story no oil or gas boilers, so effectively pushing heat pumps, which aren’t a great technology just yet, woodburners are an old thing, and would only really suit the faux style houses being built new or converted, still doesn’t stop external wood burners though, which is just as bad for posh style outdoor settings these days.

Assuming that there are no issues with the electricity grid then …

No reason for any house with central heating to need a log burner.

Unfortunately, the rural areas where wood is cheap and plentiful and there are no areas of high particulate emissions are exactly those most at risk of grid failure. (FWIW we’re on an estate-wide LPG grid and had an extended outage a couple of years ago when the delivery tankers were blocked by snowdrifts.)

It would seem that there was supposed to be some allowance made for wood stoves being used as back-up but that didn’t make it into the legislation. Given some other recent policy decisions I think this will add to the call for some sort of Highlands and Islands party before the next Holyrood election.

Scotroutes- I think the concern that has led government to do this isn’t outdoor air quality but indoor air quality. Environmental Standards Scotland (who are effectively the overseers of whether Scottish environmental policy is working now we’re not in the EU) flagged indoor air quality as a potentially big health risk because of woodburners. Scottish Government have clearly decided that this is the way to deal with it.

I’m so glad I fitted my Morso inset stove back in October insulated between flue liner and brick with pumice as I’ve never used the central heating since

So easy to have 22° in the room slightly too hot but open the door and the rest of the house is 17°.

So efficient with ash rarely needing to be removed but the wood has to be bone dry, a Stihl moisture meter handy tool

Before everyone gets on their high horse about pollution take a look at how busy the council recycling is at the weekend, the amount of junk bought off Amazon, the IKEA throwaway folk with all that stuff shipped from China in those reeky ships

Don’t get me started on how many planes fly from UK or the pollution cruise ships

Just watching the flames dancing here as I write. The stove was 2nd hand but like new

@munrobiker – fairysnuff. My other point, about grid resilience, stands though.

@redmex – this isn’t to do with pollution but human health.

On the grid resilience thing … new homes in more at risk areas should be built with energy storage, surely?

On the grid resilience thing … new homes in more at risk areas should be built with energy storage, surely?

Ok – that’ll keep them warm for the first 2hours. Even with solar.

What they going to do for the rest of the outage ?

Don’t get me started on the new bsi guidance that means it’s  impossible to have an storage in many new builds and or covenants on fitting of solar panels to the roof of the new builds as it’s “not in keeping with the aesthetic of the estate”

You could do that but how many would be willing to pay the extra for it?

And no as a forum I don’t think we can be classed as you’re average home buyer

Sooo…. could you have a wood fuel boiler in a plant room type arrangement?

A house insulated to the latest building standards, and done properly, will take days to cool down. Not that I’m against people likely to suffer outages having a wood burner.

Sooo…. could you have a wood fuel boiler in a plant room type arrangement?

How **** big is your house?