Smoke Pollution in Urban Areas

malinheader

A person close to me burns the cheapest coal he can get. I notice that there is always a substantial difference in the smoke on a calm night, even the smell is stronger in my view. Is there a difference in the ordinary coal to the very cheapest coal smoke wise

L1011

malinheader wrote: »

A person close to me burns the cheapest coal he can get. I notice that there is always a substantial difference in the smoke on a calm night, even the smell is stronger in my view. Is there a difference in the ordinary coal to the very cheapest coal smoke wise

Yes. And people in smokeless areas can get dodgy deliveries from beyond the end of the regs (see threads in Bargain Alerts about NI firms doing it for instance) to 'bypass' the rules and get smoky crud.

highdef

mickster29 wrote: »

. Neighbour built a single storey extension (Dublin City). Put in a stove and transports couple of hundred bags of turf to burn in said stove. These people are financially well off and have oil central heating but now use this sparingly. The smoke coming from this flue (burning turf) comes into the rooms upstairs as well as downstairs and is extremely bad..

I live in a small rural village which is located in a small valley. On cold still nights, an inversion often develops so all the smoke from the chimneys sits in the village and does not rise. I've not once ever got a hint of a smell of smoke inside my home during these conditions, despite the fact that I have vents in each room. You must have some weather proofing issues going on if you have smoke entering your home, assuming that your windows are closed of course. If it's very bad, does this mean that you can see the smoke in the rooms?

Whilst I also have asthma, I absolutely love that smell of the burning coal fires on those cold still nights, especially around dusk when half the village are lighting their fires and there's a veritable smog outside.

Galwayguy35

Use briquettes myself in an open fire, very clean and good heat out of them as well.

highdef

Galwayguy35 wrote: »

Use briquettes myself in an open fire, very clean and good heat out of them as well.

They're so so. Colombian or Polish coal are my favourite. Great heat and burn for ages. Lots of smoke until the fire gets going but once it's going I usually don't even need to top up during the evening, once the stove dampeners are closed or almost closed.

magicbastarder

the only good thing about burning turf is the smell. IIRC, it's worst for heat, and in my experience produces the most ash.

AutoTuning

One of the biggest issues now is that we should have transitioned a lot more households to natural gas central heating, as it’s both efficient and cheap but also produces no local pollution.

Because of CO2 focus now, gas boilers are frowned upon but at the same time the cost of deep retrofit to use heat pumps is enormous in comparison. So we are probably going to end up creating a fuel poverty trap where you’ll have houses that never had central heating being unable to update to gas and being unable to afford to do the scale of upgrade required to go with heat pumps.

Affordable district heating schemes are perfectly feasible in any urban area. Some of the apartment schemes left people with a bad experience of a very expensive single supplier systems. It’s no more complicated than installing gas mains and could be an alternative, but it comes with downsides if you’ve things like supplier lock in and no market.

I agree though the air quality in many urban areas in Ireland is unacceptably bad. Cork City is often ludicrously bad and that’s supposed to be a smokeless area for a very long time, so obviously Smokey fuel is getting in very easily.

We do need to do something about it as it’s clearly detrimental to human health. There’s a lot of evidence to support that and really it’s not a debatable issue.

Galwayguy35

highdef wrote: »

They're so so. Colombian or Polish coal are my favourite. Great heat and burn for ages. Lots of smoke until the fire gets going but once it's going I usually don't even need to top up during the evening, once the stove dampeners are closed or almost closed.

Used to get coal myself, great heat out of it all right but was too dirty I thought.

malinheader

L1011 wrote: »

Yes. And people in smokeless areas can get dodgy deliveries from beyond the end of the regs (see threads in Bargain Alerts about NI firms doing it for instance) to 'bypass' the rules and get smoky crud.

This coal being bought is local enough. But asking someone else about it said they enquired about it and was told it's great coal for the price but not much heat !!!!

air

John_Rambo wrote: »

The bad air in Dublin is due to vehicular traffic. The coal ban was a complete success and the capital doesn't suffer from that heavy hanging winter smog from turf and coal burning that smaller towns suffer from.

This is untrue.
The air quality is 10x worse at night when there are virtually no cars on the roads. It's all outlined in the EPA air quality report.

Stovepipe

No shortage of cars on the road at night, especially on the M50 and the motorways. Plenty of commercial traffic of all sizes, regardless of the pandemic.......I knew a local fuel guy and asked him about his coal supply when the smoky coal ban came into effect in Dublin. He said that the townies swapped with the culchies, bag for bag and normal jogging resumed.

malinheader

magicbastarder wrote: »

the only good thing about burning turf is the smell. IIRC, it's worst for heat, and in my experience produces the most ash.

I remember when I was younger on a cold windy night you would need a stack beside the range and you would be like a stoker on one of them old steam ships keeping the range fed.

Any time I smell a turf fire now always brings back nice memories not bad ones.

air

Stovepipe wrote: »

No shortage of cars on the road at night, especially on the M50 and the motorways. Plenty of commercial traffic of all sizes, regardless of the pandemic.......I knew a local fuel guy and asked him about his coal supply when the smoky coal ban came into effect in Dublin. He said that the townies swapped with the culchies, bag for bag and normal jogging resumed.

And how do you explain the extremely low pollution (relatively) levels during the day then?

magicbastarder

Weather? Inversions more likely to happen at night, for example?

Wanderer78

salonfire wrote:

The sale of stoves of stoves should be banned and active night-time enforcement with heavy fines for any household allowing smoke escape their chimney.

So what's your alternative for heating homes?

air

magicbastarder wrote: »

Weather? Inversions more likely to happen at night, for example?

It's every day, not during freak weather conditions.
Have a look here at page 22 of the 2019 air quality report and see if it changes your opinion.

http://www.epa.ie/pubs/reports/air/quality/Air%20Quality%20In%20Ireland%202019.pdf

Mimon

We have all gas heating installed in my estate.

Some people have converted to solid fuel and you really notice as you walk past these houses, especially when you get that inversion happening in frosty/foggy weather and the smoke hangs in the air.

Plays havoc with my asthma.

Mimon

Wanderer78 wrote: »

So what's your alternative for heating homes?

Hopefully the government would put their money where their mouth is and a full grant to cover conversion costs.

malinheader

Mimon wrote: »

We have all gas heating installed in my estate.

Some people have converted to solid fuel and you really notice as you walk past these houses, especially when you get that inversion happening in frosty/foggy weather and the smoke hangs in the air.

Plays havoc with my asthma.

What is the reason for conversion. Is it cost or more heat

Graces7

magicbastarder wrote: »

the only good thing about burning turf is the smell. IIRC, it's worst for heat, and in my experience produces the most ash.

I mix turf and smokeless coal. And I use the ash as cat litter... In which case turf ash is better than coal ash..

But cost is the real decider. My last turf was a gift

magicbastarder

Coal ash is toxic.

Wanderer78

Mimon wrote: »

Hopefully the government would put their money where their mouth is and a full grant to cover conversion costs.

they need to, but will they....

Its not only respiratory health affected, evidence now linking open fires to dementia


https://www.homecare.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1636915/scientists-link-dementia-fires-home

air

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2020/1201/1181748-air-pollution/
Air pollution at a 30 year high in Dublin and other towns and cities only a few weeks ago.
Really sad to see us going backward in this regard.

Hotblack Desiato

Stovepipe wrote: »

If the exhaust outlet is as illegal as you say, then he will have to either raise it to an acceptable height or scrap it.

You could've just said stove pipe, Stovepipe

Stovepipe wrote: »

You'll notice that a lot of the stylish modern houses featured in the TV shows about clever designs always have a stove as ultimate back up and always have solar as a back up.

All new houses have to have a source of renewable energy, doesn't have to be the main heating source but it has to be there.

magicbastarder

air wrote: »

It's every day, not during freak weather conditions.
Have a look here at page 22 of the 2019 air quality report and see if it changes your opinion.

http://www.epa.ie/pubs/reports/air/quality/Air%20Quality%20In%20Ireland%202019.pdf

cheers; part of the issue with tackling this is that stoves and open fires are regularly lumped together (but that report does make the point that open fires are particularly worse for PM emissions); i have seen claims that stoves emit a fifth or a quarter of the amount open fires do. there are houses near us where you'd regularly see a chimney smoking for hours on end, but with a good stove, the smoke would often be close to invisible.
not that tackling any difference between them from a legislation point of view would be easy.

Mimon

malinheader wrote: »

What is the reason for conversion. Is it cost or more heat

Probably people wanting a real fire vs a gas one. It is nice but in urban areas the health effects are pretty severe.

AutoTuning

While I know there is a fuel poverty issue, I think we also need to be aware that there's a lot of installations of stoves and fireplaces that are purely decorative / obsession with open fires that we have in these islands and those will attempt to hide behind a notion of fuel poverty which doesn't impact them.

I know a few people who've gone on absolutely huge rants when anyone suggested they shouldn't burn solid fuel on the edge of the city centre and these are not people who've no central heating or any kind of financial issues around fuel. It's just a choice.

Most other northern European countries also once had fixations on nostalgic open fires or stoves and many of them just moved on to cleaner fuels anyway. Nostalgia can't really be an excuse for inflicting health problems on urban residents.

BattleCorp

AutoTuning wrote: »

Nostalgia can't really be an excuse for inflicting health problems on urban residents.

How do you protect the fuel poverty people though?

John_Rambo

Where do we stand on eco-logs? The ones made from compressed sawdust.