While the wood burning stove doesn’t sound even remotely futuristic, there are in fact a variety of simple yet compelling reasons why this apparent relic of the past is poised to re-emerge as an important heating technology in the years ahead.

The original wood burning stove was born of necessity about two hundred and fifty years ago when the rapid expansion of Philadelphia led to a chronic shortage of firewood. Among the residents happened to be the famous inventor Benjamin Franklin, who developed the circulating stove to alleviate this issue.

This new stove was orders of magnitude more efficient than a conventional open fire, which meant quite simply that a reduced amount of wood was needed which in turn substantially eased the excess demand for this finite resource. The first design was soon improved with a front door, to seal and even better control the airflow, and it remained fundamentally unchanged for the succeeding 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 counted on gas and oil to operate their heating systems. Many quite sensibly began to reconsider wood burners given the easily accessible and thus more affordable supply of fuel.

It could all have gone horribly wrong at this point as two hundred year old heating technology confronted modern fuel efficiency and pollution laws. But instead there were soon wood burners that boasted heat resistant linings, automation, and catalytic converters even. This new breed was a serious match for even the most up-to-date oil and gas boilers.

The wood stove continued comfortably along in this new upgraded form, but remained a decidedly minor player in the heating technology world. That was until oil depletion and climate change started creeping up the global agenda. Without doubt the escalating price of oil at first drove this new resurgence in the popularity of the humble wood burner, but concern about carbon footprints was also becoming a factor.

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 take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and split it into carbon in the form of wood and oxygen which is released back into the air.

All that is necessary to clean up the CO2 discharged by burning the wood from a tree is to grow another tree. It really is as straightforward as that and for that reason, although it will probably never become a dominant heating technology, woodburning is likely to be with us for quite some time yet. Think of it as a kind of solar energy that helps clear CO2 from the atmosphere while the fuel grows.

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