Ending and Beginning

First fire of the season in the woodstove today.

Menards, one of our local home-improvement stores, is advertising a woodstove for $195, this one. I like the design of it, where you put logs in end-first, because it will take logs up to 27″ long, which would mean quite a bit less cutting of wood compared to the 16″ limit on our Intrepid II. AND, for $195, I could buy 5 or 6 of them for what we paid for ours.

But here’s what that stove’s manufacturer says about the stove meeting EPA requirements: “Vogelzang stoves meet EPA requirements for “exempt” wood/coal burning appliances (stoves).” Which means that it’s exempt from the EPA requirements and so meets no standards whatsoever. Weird.

It turns out that the EPA has these odd standards for which stoves require certification and which don’t. The stove for sale at my local Menards should be required to meet the EPA certification requirements. People are going to buy that stove and put it in their house to heat with, in other words, they’re going to use it just like I use mine. But because the EPA leaves these loopholes, it doesn’t have to meet any standards at all: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/resources/publications/monitoring/caa/woodstoves/exemptwood.pdf

I guess I should be happy about limits to government regulation, but it’s still pretty odd….

This entry was posted on 29 September 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Burning wood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.