Reduce your impact on global warming and electrical supply and save money whilst renovating your home
The last part of the year is historically the peak time for home improvements. While you are planning or undertaking this work, you should install a Closed Combustion Wood Stove (CCWS) to warm your home during the winter season. Closed Combustion Wood Stoves are rated around the world as being both efficient and environmentally friendly. They come in a wide range of heat outputs. If correctly sized and operated, they are capable of heating large areas of the home during the winter season.
Wood being burnt in a CCWS typically reaches a combustion temperature of more than 900°C. At these temperatures, wood is burned at nearly 80% efficiency, wasting very little energy by way of excess heat released into the atmosphere.
Wood being burned in a good quality CCWS releases fewer harmful emissions than wood decomposing naturally in the forest. If you are growing trees and burning trimmed or dead wood, or if you are sourcing your wood from a sustainable forestry industry, your contribution towards global warming is nil from a CCWS.
The cost of heating (assuming you are buying wood at about R1 400 per ton) is about 50c per KWh, which is less than 20% of the cost of heating your home with electricity or gas. The cost of installing a CCWS can generally be paid off in about two years of electricity/gas savings.
Warming your home in winter with a CCWS will reduce your electrical demand by about 10 000KWh per year. This change in your home will reduce Eskom’s coal consumption by four tons of coal per year and save more than a swimming pool of water being used in the power-generation process.
If you were previously burning gas for home heating, it will save 16 x 48kg gas bottles being consumed per year. For a country with high air pollution and scarce water and electrical resources, we should all be carefully considering our choices in terms of lowering our use of fossil fuels and our impact on the environment. In addition, as South Africans we can add to this the possibility of reducing the impact of load shedding.