Re: Best alternative to gas patio heaters

[SJP]

Or put a jumper on or go inside

[Mary Fisher]

Or build a bread oven, fire it up before you intend sitting outside, cook the bread and enjoy it and the residual heat for yourself and family and friends.

Mary

[dennis]

If you insulated the bread oven you wouldn't need as much fuel and would reduce your CO2 emissions. However it wouldn't warm you as much.

[Mary Fisher]

Ours is so well insulated that you can hardly feel any heat on the outside skin. It has to be well insulated to work.

But you're reckoning without radiant heat ... which is what you get from patio heaters. From a bread oven you get the radiant heat after the bread has baked and the door is left off.

As for CO2 emissions, wood is used for the fire so the effect is neutral over far less time than it is from gas - and there's no processing except for sawing the limbs off the tree, which is what we do.

Mary

[dennis]

No they don't, they produce the same amount of heat. If anything a quartz halogen one would produce more light and less heat but its irrelevant as the light gets converted to heat anyway.

[dennis]

You actually believe that because its wood burning its carbon neutral? Even if you plant a tree now it will take tens of years before it absorbs the carbon so you are at least polluting the world with CO2 for a few decades.

[the_constructor]

Just going slightly off topic a moment. There was a bod on the radio this morning talking about the new energy surveyors that the government are training and he said, that some of the measures to get a persons house upto the specified standard would be quite expensive but would pay for themselves within 9 years. The interviewer said, well, what happens if a person can't afford to pay for the work that needs to be done. The reply was deafening silence!!

[Mary Fisher]

" the effect is neutral over far less time than it is from gas"

Read before you jump in.

Mary

[Dave Liquorice]

Look in the other direction, the tree you cut down to burn absorbed CO2 over the last 50 odd years. It is not releasing fossil carbon which is the

*real* problem. Dumping back into the atmosphere tonnes of carbon that had been safely locked up for millions of years.

[dennis]

The reality is that it is not neutral and probably never will be. Do you own a forest and make sure you don't burn more than you grow? If you do how are you going to ensure it is never cut down? Maybe you can grow trees and dump them in an ocean trench at a faster rate than you burn them?

[Steve Firth]

What's "the latest" about something that my granny had to keep her bathroom warm in 1967?

We keep out patio warm with zero net CO2 emissions by burning logs in a log burner. And that lets us do arrosticini in the embers which is impossible with a pathetic 1300W electric fire.

[Mark Spice]

What if, like me, you use wood from trees that have either beeen blown down or chopped down by the the local property developers? That way it is relatively eco-friendly as the wood was only going to burnt on a bonfire if I hadn't got some use out of it.

Although to be honest I don't much care for the eco-friendly or not arguements - there is something deeply satisfying about prodding a fire with a stick whilst drinking a beer and if I can do it at liitle or no cost by using free wood then that's a bonus.

Cheers

Mark

[dennis]

If you believe CO2 is the problem it doesn't matter if its from fossil fuels or if its from brewing beer.

[dennis]

No you don't (I can say that with almost 100% certainty.. just do the sums). I bet you didn't plant a forest 20 years ago just to save some CO2 so you could burn it now. If not then what you said isn't true and will probably never be true.

[Mary Fisher]

You're straying a bit.

You said that a planted tree will take tens of years ... we only use trees fromour own garden or others' (not forests) which would otherwise be landfill. the alternative to baking bread using wood is baking it using electricity, oil or gas.

[dennis]

So you are taking CO2 trapped in wood and releasing it into the atmosphere.. how is that carbon neutral? Even if you replant that tree the CO2 is there for years and then released again when you decide to burn it again. Also it may well be more green to use gas or electricity in a better oven (say at a bakery).

I get annoyed by these so called greens saying how they are carbon neutral and that I should do my bit too.

[<me9]

An electric heat pump will give something like 3KW of heat for 1300w input.

(not really suitable for a patio heater though. Best patio heater comes in a bottle and fits a pint glass *-)).

[Steve Firth]

No, I planted most of it 15 to 5 years ago. But the wood I use is growth from about three to ten years old, and is (some of) the three tonnes of prunings I take each year.

You're talking out of your arse, HTH.

[Steve Firth]

Because the carbon in wood is absorbed from the atmosphere.

[Mary Fisher]

I prefer to eat real bread.

We'd never have guessed.