You must admit that proposing the wood stove as a mainstream heating technology for the 21st Century hardly seems credible, but follow along and see why this blast from the past has a rosy future ahead of it.

Wind back to the early development of Philadelphia over two and a half centuries ago when a swiftly growing population brought about a severe shortage of wood. Luckily, one of America\’s best known inventors at the time (Benjamin Franklin) had made his home in the city and designed a brand new \”circulating wood stove\” to address the problem.

This new stove was orders of magnitude more efficient than a traditional open fire, which meant quite simply that a reduced amount of wood was needed which in turn significantly eased the extra demand for this finite resource. The initial design was subsequently improved with a front door, to seal and even better manage the airflow, and it remained fundamentally unchanged for the subsequent two hundred or so years.

By the time the 1970s rolled around, a familiar story resurfaced; the oil crises of that period of time limited the supply of oil which in turn impacted the many people who by this time depended on gas and oil to run their heating systems. Many quite sensibly began to reconsider wood burners given the readily available and thus cheaper supply of fuel.

However, things didn\’t pan out so simply. For a start there were now much more strict controls on pollution and energy efficiency, so manufacturers set to redesigning key elements and using modern materials. Pretty soon the modern wood burner had heat retaining linings, catalytic converters, automated fuel feed and control systems, and had parked its tanks squarely on the conventional gas boiler\’s lawn.

This reinvention of the wood burning stove ambled along for a few more decades, up until the early 21st Century when it started to hit home that a) CO2 emissions are a serious issue, and b) oil really will run out. As still more people clambered aboard the (by now highly efficient and low pollution) wood burner bandwagon another thought also occurred.

Burning wood is in fact not only cheap, it\’s also a more or less carbon neutral and completely renewable form of energy. So long as the sun continues to shine, trees will soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and split it into carbon in the form of wood and oxygen which is released back into the air.

Grow another tree to replace the one used for firewood and it will re-absorb the same amount of carbon as was released by burning the first. This is clearly not going to supplant our existing fossil fuel based infrastructure overnight, but it will certainly continue into the foreseeable future as an important heating technology. If you think about it, wood burning is just an indirect type of solar energy with the added bonus that the more fuel you grow, the more CO2 you scrub from the atmosphere.

For much more information on this subject, check out these additional articles about the wood stove heating and wood stoves.