Last Fall (October 2007), we purchased and installed a Greenwood Model 100 indoor wood-fired hydronic furnace. It has been a terrible experience. So terrible in fact, that we’ve created a website to warn others about the problems they can expect from a Greenwood Furnace. Here’s our story:
We wanted to burn wood for heat not because we were interested in saving money, but because we wanted to be “carbon neutral” and reduce or eliminate fossil fuel dependence.
Before purchasing a wood fired furnace, we did extensive research into a wide selection of indoor wood-fired hydronic furnaces: Wood Doctor, Tarm, Eko, Garn, Alternate Heating Systems, Greenwood and many more. We spoke with many manufacturers and dealers and traveled great distances to inspect actual units and, whenever possible, see them in operation. We did our homework!
We finally chose the Greenwood Model 100 because Greenwood claimed--on their website, in their brochure, and through the mouths of their sales people--that “it is safe to operate, burns smoke and creosote free…” and is “…as safe to operate as a home water heater.”
Don’t believe it. It is not so.
Our Greenwood furnace has caused us major smoke and creosote problems. The neighbors have complained bitterly about the smoke and the town has issued us a cease and desist order. Greenwood Furnaces, Inc. has been uncooperative. We sincerely wish to “go green,” but with an unusable wood-fired furnace and no resolution assistance from the company that sold it to us, we may be forced to return to oil heat this coming winter.
If the above link does not work, here is our website: www.greenwoodfurnace-warning.info
The only nastier way to heat a home then burning wood in a furnace is perhaps burning coal in a home furnace.
It is a complete crock to somehow consider burning wood in a home furnace to be somehow or in any possible sense, "green". I suppose that the CO2 might be considered neutral because it can be recycled into another tree. But even if that is true, CO2 is only a very minor pollutant. Some people even consider it to be a beneficial gas that is necessary for plant life.
The problem is that besides CO2, lots of other truly nasty pollutants go up your smoke stack. There is the little matter of conservation of mass and energy. If you burn a ton (2000 lbs) of wood, then at the end of the burning process all of that mass still exists. Maybe 100 lbs of it is ashes (which are very base and a bit of an environmental disposal problem). The other 1900 lbs went up your chimney as various flue gasses and fine nasty particulate matter. Some of them are harmless like water vapor and CO2. But some of them are extremely poisonous and unlike CO2 are actually harmful to life and the environment.
If you don't believe that you are emitting large amounts of poisonous pollutants by burning a wood stove (and the particular brand of stove does not really matter because even the most efficient still must obey the Law of Conservation of Mass), here is an experiment for you to try. Go up on your roof with a garbage bag while your furnace is burning. Put the garbage bag over the chimney so it catches your smoke. Put your head in the bag and breath deep for as many breaths as you can stand it while raw smoke continues to flow into the bag. That will probably be about 1 breath and you will be gagging. If you don't quickkly withdraw your head you will soon be dead.
If you really care about the environment, quit burning your nasty wood stove and buy yourself some nice clean electricity to heat your house. Even if that electricity comes from a coal burning power plant, it will be cleaner then the equivalent amount of energy from a wood stove because the emissions from the coal fired plant are scrubbed through hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment which safely removes most of the nasty pollutants while your wood stove is belching them out raw and unscrubbed directly into the environment.
CO2 is not the problem. It is everything else nasty and poisonous that comes out of a chimney.