It looks the future could be a return to our past when it comes to heating our homes. A hundred years most people heated their homes with wood and a lot of people are making the move back to wood with systems that are more efficient and a lot less polluting.
“It can come in a variety of different forms of heating applications, you can use chunk wood, split-logs. You can use pellets and an alternative and then there's different systems that people can look at as alternatives for home heating,” said Dr. Timothy Volk, SUNY-ESF.
One system many people already have is a fireplace.
It looks the future could be a return to our past when it comes to heating our homes. A hundred years most people heated their homes with wood and a lot of people are making the move back to wood with systems that are more efficient and a lot less polluting. Terry Ettinger has more.
The challenge with fireplaces is they're open, they're pulling in air out of your room into the fireplace to burn the wood and the heat is largely going up the chimney.
Fireplace inserts help solve that problem.
“The first round of inserts with fireplaces that occurred after the oil crunch in the mid-seventies were a step forward but we've come another whole large step since then,” said Volk.
Federal regulations limit what pollution or soot can escape up the chimney from fireplace inserts and wood stoves and furnaces. The regulations cover split wood or the increasingly popular pellet stoves.
“All pellets are is ground up wood either from sawmills or processing facilities or wood harvested from the forest and it's ground and it's pressed to make little pellets,” said Volk.
The beauty of pellets is you get that material and most of the stoves have a hopped or container so you can dump in a day’s worth of pellets. It will be metered automatically and many now have thermostats so you can set the temperature you want.
Dr. Timothy Volk envisions even less work for homeowners with a home delivery system developing when demand becomes strong enough.