As someone who suffers through winter smog caused by people in my county heating their homes with wood, please please please use a modern efficient heating source instead of this neopasotral quackery.
This is less healthful for me than propane in terms of indoor air pollution. But it is more healthful in terms of exercise and fire prevention. I've accepted that compromise with the help of an air purifier that stays on all winter. Also, when I can get all of my fuel within a few hundred yards of my front door, most of the extraction and transportation costs go away.
And there's something else that's very important to me: When I burn propane, I micromanage the thermostat to save money. I wear heavier clothes all winter and end up tolerating being more cold and uncomfortable. With wood fuel being so much more economical, and surfing the edge of comfort less practical, I just keep the woodstove going all day and cool the house at mid day by opening some windows ... getting fresh air that I just don't get when using propane. So the house is mostly warmer all day than with propane, and I'm wearing less and generally more comfortable.
It's a pretty easy choice for me. I'd like to keep it up as long as I'm physically able.
The fire gets going very hot, burns off all of the stuff that comes out of wood, on purpose, to turn into heat, which heats the masonry, which will stay warm for a very long time. The dome also radiates heat for a very long time. The final outlet, out of the house, expels tepid, wet, clean air; contains only CO2 as a byproduct, iirc.
I live in a semi rural heavily forested area where wood heat is an option. I definitely notice the drop in air quality when winter comes around. Part of the problem is that for whatever reason wood smoke from stoves tends to hang out at ground level and cover the area rather than rising away. I don’t get any benefit from wood heat, but I do suffer the costs…
> Wood can be burned without too much air pollution, but then the temperature has to be high enough: 1100 to 1200 degrees Celsius. In that case, 99 percent of the wood is converted to CO2 and water vapour, almost without smoke. A metal wood stove, however, only reaches a temperature of 650 to 700 degrees, with an incomplete wood combustion as a result.
CO2 is a critical problem.
Contrasted with burning coal, oil, or gas, preferred.
(Woodfuel may still be burned unsustainably, that's a separate question.)
Noted FWIW in TFA:
[U]nlike gas and oil, wood is a renewable and CO2-neutral fuel (the CO2 that is produced by the burning of wood was taken out of the atmosphere by the tree during the years before). The problem is that wood stoves are not very efficient, and extremely polluting.
Though obviously this isn't the case if the wood comes from badly-managed forests that are not replanted. And there are other effects that can make wood fuel carbon-positive:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-burni...
I'm guessing it's outside of the economic envelope in which people are burning wood anyways, but the article makes it sound like combusting at the "right" temperature essentially solves that problem. But I suppose at that point you might as well just burn something cleaner and retain the other advantageous parts of the design.
Of course, since each rmh is custom built, you need to actually test the exhaust of every one to ensure it works as intended.
Mine is pretty swell, albeit a tad annoying to keep going if we leave for a few days and the whole mass cools. With that said, it uses about 1/10th the wood of a new high efficiency wood stove we use in a different building.
RMHs are very interesting to me, but unfortunately due to their niche status, they're currently very hard to get insured.
(PS. I would love to see a picture of your RMH, is possible!)
Reading that article, I am curious as to why they say that rmh are less efficient than tile stoves. The exhaust temp on mine is around 130-150 degrees F- cooler than a fresh cup of coffee. And yet, I get pretty complete combustion- so all of the heat from the wood is captured inside my house.
I recently saw a claim that rmh can produce less CO2 for the same heat than gas furnaces, though that was just someone on the internet, I would definitely want more research to claim that.
There's no coal consumption to speak of. There's diesel fuel consumption, though that is largely concentrated on transport corridors (I-80, I-580, US-101).
Wildfire emissions all but certainly swamp woodstove usage.
That said, yes, a small number of poorly-tuned fireplaces can create a large amount of smoke. Where the intent is actual useful heating, and not fireplace-as-decoration, thats' a solvable problem.
Look on page 7
39% Wood Smoke 12 Cooking 12 Other Mobile Sources 12 Road Dust 7 On-Road Motor Vehicles 6 Combustion: Stationary Sources 5 Industrial/Commercial Processes 3 Construction and Farming Dust 2 Animal Waste 1 Wind-Blown Dust 1 Wildfires
Wildfires are basically non-existent in the winter, although the Colorado fire currently doesn't bode well for future California winters.
My understanding is that here in NYC the single largest (non-industrial?) source of air pollution is heating oil. The city banned the two worst heating oils back in 2015, but with a long phase-out period[1]. I would have expected the situation to be the same in most other cities, although SF's weather certainly doesn't justify oil burning the way NYC's does :-)
[1]: https://www.ny-engineers.com/blog/how-nyc-is-phasing-out-hea...
Our heating costs dropped so significantly that the Gas company called, concerned that we weren't running our Natural Gas fired furnace and that we might need financial assistance.
We heated this way for many years after he died. I took up the responsibility of cutting down trees, splitting wood; and keeping the house warm. It is A LOT of work, but worth it if you have access to the trees/woodlots.
In the future (if this housing crisis ever ends), I will be adding a Rocket Mass Heater to my home. There is nothing in the world that compares to the feel of a roaring fire on a cold winter. One year the power went out in a very large geographic region that affected a large portion of the population. No electricity meant that no furnaces were running; so we had some elderly neighbors and family move in with us. They could have easily died without our wood-stove running. We even used it to cook on!