You must admit that proposing the wood stove as a mainstream heating technology for the 21st Century scarcely seems credible, but follow along and learn 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 an acute shortage of wood. Fortunately, one of America’s best known inventors at the time (Benjamin Franklin) had made his home in the city and designed a new “circulating wood stove” to tackle the issue.

This new stove was orders of magnitude more effective than a traditional open fire, which meant quite simply that not as much wood was required which in turn substantially eased the excess demand for this limited resource. The first design was subsequently enhanced 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 restricted the supply of oil which in turn impacted the many people who by this time relied on gas and oil to run their heating systems. Many quite sensibly began to reconsider wood burners given the easily accessible and thus less costly supply of fuel.

This time however there were all manner of new constraints to contend with; put simply you couldn’t install a wood stove any more unless it complied with stringent emission and efficiency criteria. But rather than put people off, this instead spurred on development of the technology to incorporate features such as catalytic converters, heat absorbing liners and automatic controls and fuel supplies. It wasn’t long before wood burners could compete head on with normal gas and oil fired boilers.

The wood stove continued comfortably along in this new improved form, but remained a decidedly modest player in the heating technology world. That was until oil depletion and climate change started creeping up the global agenda. Unquestionably the escalating price of oil originally drove this new resurgence in the popularity of the humble wood burner, but worry 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.

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 form of solar power with the added bonus that the more fuel you grow, the more CO2 you scrub from the atmosphere.

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