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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

> Demand for the [wood-burning] stoves, which cost between £400 and £7,000, has tripled in the last five years – partly down to the savings they can make to energy bills.

This raises lots of moral questions. Should London ban wood stoves, effectively increasing costs for some of its poorest inhabitants?

Burning wood might produce pollutants, but how does the net effect compare to the production of the oil/gas/electricity required to produce the alternative? Of course that production is done off-site, not in urban centers, but it wouldn't surprise me if wood-burning is better for the environment than manufacturing the necessary amount of coal/oil/gas/electricity required to heat the same house.

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Poor people in London don't burn wood, they use prepay meters which cost a fortune to top up. This is because:

a) Wood burners are expensive and trendy

b) It takes time and energy to get and/or chop up wood (you really need a car to pick it up at least)

c) You need a good credit rating to get access to cheaper gas/elec tariffs, so prepay meters is usually the only thing a poor person can qualify for

Banning wood burning stoves would be a great move overall. If wood-burning is really that much more efficient (it isn't) then let's centralize it and burn wood in the power plants instead of coal.

I really wanted a wood burner (it's fun to burn wood, creates a tremendous amount of heat and looks awesome), but now I know the environmental costs I won't get one - it's completely irresponsible to use one in a city.

> prepay meters

Wow, that's a nasty way to treat your citizens!

How it's done usually: Any apartment or house has a meter. You have to pay by KWh from time to time. If it doesn't get paid, it's eventually owner's problem.

Bonus points for multi-range electricity meters and central heating. Extra points for central heating with heating meters (OK just kidding about this one).

> Wow, that's a nasty way to treat your citizens!

How do you mean? If someone can't afford to pay, they need to seek help. Why should this suddenly become the problem of the owner of the building? Why should she be the person crediting another person? There are different ways to solve this problem and shifting it to the owner isn't the most fair one.

The assumption here is that a random tenant won't afford to pay for electricity. Which isn't a huge bill as bills go.

I'm kind of shocked by a culture which assumes that kind of thing.

Also, electricity is a kind of neccesity so cutting someone's electricity is a bit like leaving them endangered, which is arguably a crime.

The owner of a building has to collect rent anyway, so I don't see why electricity would be an especial concern.

You missed a crucial step:

1.5: owner gets fed up of paying tenant's bills, installs prepay meters

I don't know what kind of setup would require this, I've had 8 different rental properties in UK so far and every single time the gas/electricity were in my name, not in the landlord's name.

At lower end of the market it's more common, AFAIK, especially these houses where they've split them into 3 or 4 seperate units (multi-occupancy) and it's impractical to have 3/4 different metered supplies.

In my younger days I had a bedsit with a coin-meter even though there was a separate meter in the hallway. Landlord had it set to a crazy high rate so he was making a profit on it.

One day two guys forcibly entered the building to cut off the supply because he hadn't been paying the bill. According to them, my set up wasn't exactly unique.

Usually, when tenant is incapable of paying bills, he becomes ex-tenant.

It gets worse:

- Typical prepay meter cost: £1,026

- Typical credit meter cost: £807

Whooooa!

My meter probably cost me ~£150. It's pretty high tech at that price mark. Does £800 meter also doubles as a HDTV?

Prepay only exists for people with extremely poor credit history, or if you fail to pay your bills few times in a row, the electricity/gas company will forcibly switch you to prepay.

>> Extra points for central heating with heating meters (OK just kidding about this one).

I used to live in an apartment that had a heating meter on every single individual radiator - but then the heating was provided by a central boiler room and I guess there wasn't a single point of entry into the apartment to measure the inflow there.

There's 5.9mn people in the UK on them - it's not a small amount

Usually in the US?

Metered electricity is common in working class areas of the UK. I don't know the history behind it, but as an outsider, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

That's a societal equivalent of a fridge with a lock on it.

Yes you can think of reasons for that, but they're not especially pleasing.

Prepay is especially common in Beijing...nothing like the hot water expiring during a shower!

In Beijing, though, it isn’t that bad price wise, and heating is central (and vastly shaded, since the whole apartment buildings are heated).

Burning wood is also CO2 neutral as the forest has captured this CO2 in the last few decades compared to fossil fuel that is accumulated over many millions of years.

In Norway you actually get a higher (greener) energy rating for your house if you have a wood stove, and our electrical power almost entirely hydroelectric.

The article doesn't say, but the wood pollution is relatively minor compared to diesel etc. This Greenpeace article[1] doesn't even mention wood.

[1] https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2016/11/03/causes-londons-a...

> In Norway you actually get a higher (greener) energy rating for your house if you have a wood stove, and our electrical power almost entirely hydroelectric.

You can possibly get a higher rating when you replace an old stove or an oil stove (parafinbrenner/oljekamin) with "clean-burning" stove, or do I miss something? Otherwise the rating depends on how tight the house is insulated, does it have balanced ventilation and so on.

And CO2-neutral sounds a bit hand-wavy tbh. Sure forest captured it only recently, but there's no advantage releasing it back to atmosphere.

The issue with wood in urban areas isn’t CO2, it’s the particulate pollution.

Yes, but if you have electric only and install a "peis" your rating is increased. There are better options regarding particular pollution like the pellet burning oven, but you do get higher rating from wood alone.

The CO2 part is not hand-wavy, unless you clear-cut the forest and do not let it grow back. Unfortunately that is what is happening in the rain forests of the Americas.

You need to harvest and transport that wood, so it's not CO2 neutral.

PS: Gas also takes a lot of energy to refine and transport so it's worse than the direct CO2 produced during combustion.

I think it's very dependent on where you live.

The way we do it is to walk into the forest with the axe or chainsaw (often electric) and cut down a tree. After that we drag it home and chop it up with an axe using muscle power ;)

There are even books[1] about firewood and how to stack it so it's very ingrained in the culture.

But if it's done industrially with machines then you are very correct.

[1] https://www.bokklubben.no/livsstil-hobby-og-fritid/hel-ved-l...

Sure, but London is not really known for it's forests.

Which means you burn more calories, so eat more food, which has to be grown — and farming uses fuel too (and transporting, storing, & selling that food, and cooking it, and...)

Calculating the full, e.g., carbon cost of a fuel is difficult!

You can't even compare the two. Even if you burn coal in a plant, you are required by law to use advanced filters that greatly reduce the amount of pollutants.

The poorest inhabitants in London don't live in the kind of home where they can install a wood stove. They rent and likely have central heating.

Wood smoke is surprisingly nasty. Standing next to a fire you miss this because it's all rising above you, but it cools fairly quickly and becomes a health hazard nearby. The public Heath costs vastly outweigh the savings. So, banning wood stoves and simply giving people money for something else is a net win for society.

PS: I suspect a most wood burning in London is for aesthetics not really need.

Poor inhabitants can't afford £400 for a wood burning stove.

Many parts of London are "smoke control zones", and there are already strict rules about what you can or can't burn.

Since London has already banned some burning fuel it's easy to add another type.

> Many parts of London are "smoke control zones", and there are already strict rules about what you can or can't burn. Since London has already banned some burning fuel it's easy to add another type

Except, of course - you can buy woodburning stoves specifically certified for use in smokeless zones by the DfE (I know, I have one). It's already prohibited to use non-certified stoves in those areas.

It's posers not poor people, generally. The partly due to the savings is a red herring.

I used to live in a house with a wood burner in the living room and central heating where individual radiators didn't have any regulation - so actually, in winter it was cheaper to stay in the living room most of the time, burning couple logs of wood every few hours rather than heat up the entire house using central heating. Quite significantly so actually.

The UK stopped the urban use of coal in the 1960s in order to deal with the infamously lethal smog problem.

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