Local regulations aim to bank the home fires

Meanwhile, modern designs produce emissions that meet the toughest of EPA requirements, while allowing users to have some control over their home heating bill.

Armidale Council this week voted unanimously to prohibit wood stoves in new dwellings on blocks of land 4000 square meters in size and smaller, forcing occupants to heat with electric reverse cycle air conditioning - or gas.

The move, part of a new Local Strategic Planning Statement, follows similar action in Canberra, which demands old wood heaters be scrapped when a house is sold, to be replaced with a modern burner or air conditioning.

Armidale will investigate a similar strategy for homes substantially renovated.

Meanwhile, EPA regulations on particulate matter continue to tighten, with the intention to squeeze out designs from the 1980s that allow users to bank down their fires and keep the coals glowing until morning.

The unburnt smoke and low temperature gases produced by those slumbering stoves - essentially in the process of making charcoal - creates choking smog in areas where temperature inversions are likely to occur.

Armidale's hills that surround the city cool at night and their air mass drops onto the populace below. This action forces warmer air aloft which then acts as a blanket, keeping smoke low and affecting the health of city-dwellers, particularly asthmatics, the councillors noted at their Wednesday night meeting.

Canberra has similar topography.

However, the industry lobby group Australian Home Heating says manufacturers are willing to work with governments to make wood heat suited for purpose in the modern age.

After all, there are a lot of good things about wood fires, not the least their ability to dry the air around them through an energetic process known as ionisation.

Gas exhaust, by comparison, is humid while reverse cycle air conditioning can be blamed for increases in respiratory illness and allergies.

The power consumption from air-con is also the number one reason why electricity grids have to be upgraded, and demand is predicted to substantially increase as the decades drive on.

Australian Home Heating general manager Tom Cannon says he knows asthmatics who prefer wood heat when living inside, arguing air conditioning makes them sick.

Cost of running is a big factor, of course, and even Armidale councillor Debra O'Brien, a vehement in support of the new planning statement, admitted that "people in poverty would never survive" without wood heat.

Meanwhile, a wood stove's ability to work when the power is out is a major tick for resilience.

Mr Cannon has argued that councils take a "nuanced" approach to regulation, which involves phasing out of old burners and incentivising home owners to replace them with modern stoves.

Canberra is doing this and now Armidale will join that push, having now voted to approve the offer of co-funded grant money to home owners wishing to upgrade their wood stove to cleaner-burning models.

Mr Cannon leads a volunteer board of directors who are passionate about the good things wood heat does for people.

Mr Cannon's father manufactured wood heaters and the family ran a smoke testing laboratory to stay abreast of pollution regulations.

He says modern wood heaters have reduced admissions by 75 per cent compared to the 1980s

"The older heaters are the cause of smoke," said Mr Cannon.

Today's wood stoves duct air in better ways to feed fire with pre-heated oxygen leading to an efficient burn, with more of the volatiles within the smoke burnt in the blaze.

The downside is that new stoves will not remain alight all night,

"You get about six to eight hours of burn time," says Mr Cannon. "To meet with compliance constraints they need to burn clean by burning hot.

"This is the reality of modern living."

Concerns about health impacts from wood smoke in regional areas has been smouldering for decades and in 2016 the EPA commissioned a report into the views of Upper Hunter residents, and found that:

"Due to the view in the Upper Hunter community that the mines, power stations and associated transport issues are a bigger problem than wood heaters, messages on wood heaters need to be communicated in the context of other government actions that aim to reduce particle pollution; otherwise wood heater users will feel that they are being unreasonably singled out."

Indeed, Armidale will also launch an education campaign about the health hazards of high-particulate wood smoke.

This will include lessons about biological diversity and ecology that is affected when wood is removed from the forest floor.

By the same token making use of wood residue is a bush-fire mitigation process, argues Mr Cannon.

And as Armidale councillor John Galletly expressed on Wednesday - "There's people who make a living carting wood here."

Armidale will also encourage existing stove owners to "filter" their wood smoke using catalytic converters that increase the temperature of smoke and burn-off residues.

But Cr Galletly criticised the council's intention to encourage "filters" on stove pipes as the approach had failed when trialled at Guyra.

Mr Cannon, meanwhile, says attempts to moderate smoke with catalytic converters has had mixed results, because when stoves are turned down the temperature of their smoke falls below the level required to catalyse and the elements gum up with creosote.