As I drive into town early on a cold morning there is a grey haze hanging just above tree-top level. On the main street is the unmistakable smell of wood smoke. The culprits are easy to spot. From just about any location in town at least one chimney is visible belching a plume of blue-grey smoke. After being in town for an hour, my lungs tighten up and I start coughing every few minutes. By the time my errands were done, I was glad to be on the way back home where the air is clear.

The smoke problem is unfortunate, really, because heating with wood is an important tradition in this rural area. It saves homeowners a lot of money each winter and puts people to work supplying firewood. Using a home-grown fuel like firewood helps to strengthen our local economy by keeping energy dollars circulating within our communities instead of enriching large and distant corporations.

There is no longer a good excuse for making all that smoke. In truth, there are very good reasons - in addition to cutting air pollution - for making the effort to reduce wood smoke.

To begin with, the smoke belching from a chimney is energy being wasted. Look at it this way: when wood is heated it starts to smoke and if it keeps smoking and never flames until it is reduced to charcoal, about half the energy in the wood is gone. So people who smoulder their fires and make a lot of pollution are wasting up to half of their firewood. They might think it is more efficient to keep the chimney temperature low, but it is actually more efficient to burn the fire hot and let some of the heat go up the chimney than to let fires smoulder.

When smoke is allowed to escape from the firebox unburned, it not only produces air pollution, it also forms creosote deposits on its way out as some of it condenses inside the chimney. The density of the smoke passing through the chimney has a direct effect on how often the chimney must be cleaned. And if the homeowner forgets or puts off the cleaning, a damaging chimney fire can result. Burning wood more completely so there is little or no smoke saves money on chimney cleaning and virtually eliminates the risk of chimney fire.

Less obvious, maybe, is the fact that burning bright, hot fires that don’t smoke also reduces indoor air pollution. Studies have shown that the problem of smoke flowing into the room when the loading door is opened to add more wood is mainly caused by low, smouldering fires. When fires are burned bright and hot, there is usually enough chimney draft to draw the smoke up and out of the house.

So next time you step out of the house and notice a dense plume of smoke coming from your own chimney, think about all the energy being wasted and the work and cost in chimney maintenance being added to your household budget. And think about how that smoke is affecting the vulnerable people in your community, especially the elderly whose lungs are weak and the young children whose lungs are still developing. Do you really want to be partly responsible for making your neighbors sick? Do you want to be known around town as an incompetent wood burner? I didn’t think so.

There are some steps you can take to cut down on the amount of smoke your wood heating system makes. If you do all these things you can almost eliminate visible smoke from your chimney.

As soon as you can, upgrade to an advanced technology, EPA certified wood stove or furnace. This one step can cut smoke emissions by up to 90% and reduce firewood consumption by up to one-third. Plus, you will find these new wood burners more convenient and satisfying to use.

Make sure your firewood is dry enough. The fact is, most people’s firewood is too wet because it hasn’t been stacked out in the open long enough to season properly. Firewood should be down in the 15 to 20% moisture range to ignite and burn efficiently. Hardwoods like maple and oak take more than just the summer months to dry down to this range. If you can get your wood split and stacked out in the sun and wind in the fall, a year before you burn it, you’ll get a big efficiency boost because it will be much dryer when you use it the next year than if you waited until spring to process it.

Split your wood smaller so you have a range of piece sizes, not just big chunks. Burning wood full time means you are rekindling a fire from coals at least three times each day. To rekindle without a lot of smoke, you need some small pieces that will ignite quickly and get the larger pieces burning.

Be careful not to let the wood smoulder. This takes some practice and may mean tending the fire a little more often than you are used to, but the payoff is higher efficiency, less cost and a clear conscience. In a fire that doesn’t smoke, the wood flames brightly until it is reduced to charcoal.

Those of us who heat our homes with wood should be able to take pride in keeping our families warm and safe all winter through our hard work. But we can’t feel good about ourselves if by heating with wood we are polluting our communities and making our neighbours sick.

As you walk or drive around town, notice which chimneys are belching smoke. The people who live in those houses are the ones who don’t know how to burn wood properly. You’ll find it very hard to identify the people who burn wood properly because there’s no visible smoke to give away their secret.

You’ll find plenty of reliable tips on how to run a wood fire for high efficiency and low smoke at the non-profit woodheat.org web site.

JG