buildingmaint said:
Local city officials have drafted new ordinance's for the use of outdoor wood boilers.
One, almost sounds to be designed to eliminate outdoor wood boilers from the city proper.
It say that the boilers chimney must be 4 feet above any roof line for 300' in any direction.
Just think if you live at the bottom of a hill , how high your chimney will have to be .
if someone really wants to get to the heart of the matter, look at efficiencies and particulates, not heights of buildings and chimneys
the part-libertarian-streak in me hates to see numbskull bureaucratic regulations, but having driven by some outdoor wood boilers that were being fed with who knows what for fuel, and leaving a plume that turned the sky yellow everywhere around and a disturbing distance downwind, I'd be pretty exercised if someone plunked one and ran it like that straight up wind from me in a close neighborhood. which is one of the reasons why I like living in the relative sticks
So... seems to me that, other than maybe setting some basic health and safety standards where objective measurements are used to shut down things that belch filth continuously (almost like the federal regs where heavy diesel trucks, even old ones, are supposedly only allowed to emit visible particulates for a finite brief interval during acceleration, or else they're supposed to be taken off line unless and until the problem is corrected), this all comes down to an expression that I once heard attributed to a utility CEO in the late 80s about how to get utilities and customers to invest in more efficient technologies: "the rat must be able to smell the cheese."
In the wood boiler context, this would mean: forget about stack heights. grandfather all existing units to keep peace; existing OWBs will gradually kick the bucket or otherwise be replaced. to keep life simple for farmers and rural dwellers, exempt anything on a property over 10 acres, and let the changes in technology follow the rest, as they eventually naturally will as technologies mature and costs come down. then create something in the nature of a modest annual licensing fee, that rises each year for new installs, but is kept the same for the life of the install as it is in the year of initial install, for technologies that do not burn efficiently or cleanly. take the proceeds of the "smoking fee" and start building a pool of funds for incentive credits for new installs of the really clean and efficient units. have a list of pre-qualified makes and models that are clean and efficient enough to get the credits. get a pro-wood person to administer the program, and do a lot of education and outreach not only on how much cleaner the efficient units burn, but how much less wood and labor is used- and that the useful life expectancy of the efficient units is a lot longer than the smoky units.
if it cost $50 a year for the life of the unit to operate brand new installs of a smoky inefficient unit, and someone is told that they get a $100 rebate towards a unit that not only runs cleaner and will burn less wood but last longer, then the market will not take too long to follow. you just have to give the invisible hand a nudge. Yugos were the cheapest cars going, in terms of initial cost, but consumers were familiar enough with automotive technologies and long run costs for transportation that (sensibly) almost no one bought them. We just need to get the broader public jump started up the learning curve on wood boilers.
