It’s true that modern stoves are much less polluting, but only if they’re used under the manufacturers’ ideal test conditions—which is far from the case. Here is a table summarizing the errors and their consequences 
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The Bar/Restaurant across the street from us used to have an ancient oil fired heating system which was no problem to anyone. There were no visible emissions.
Now the place has been modernised to include a wood pellet heating boiler that emits smoke all the time it runs, and which covers the walls and shutters of surrounding buildings with black soot.
I’m told that this is better for the environment. I am impressed, but not favourably.
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There must be something wrong with it, because pellets should burn very clean. If nothing else, they’re throwing away energy in all that unburned soot.
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That must be quite restricting for you, given the amount of ICE cars that still are around.
Oh no, that’s impossible. The building is owned by the Mairie ! 
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All the more reason for the problem to be sorted!
In our village the “council houses” have all been changed (from oil or gas) to pellet stoves and none give the soot you are talking about. Sounds like a fault in the airflow/mix ???
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We still have a few open fires in our house in the UK, although have converted most to stoves.
I still like an open fire though. health wise it might not be optimal but it’s great for the soul!
Heat pumps just won’t work in very old houses. I know somebody who put one into an old house, we now call it the fridge.
In the winter we get through about 2 tonnes of smokeless coal, that is also with a modern gas boiler using around 8,000kwh of gas a month.
There is no way heat pumps would ever work in our situation.
Thank you Juliet, the test they showed on the Invicta with more moist timber 25% had a modest reduction in output, all true. However my point is about the particles emmited which they put no numbers to, they have left out the actual particle count, the most relevant part to our health. As the average particle count for PM2.5 that I have measured is 11u/m3 and outside away from any source of emissions is 9u/m3 it’s a miniscule difference. Vacuuming with a Henry vacuum tops out my test meter 999u/m3 and stays very high for hours, That shocked me! Opening all windows and doors to drop that figure down it still takes hours to lower it. I sold the Henry’s and bought Dyson cylinder vacuums which after repeating the same exercise made 0 difference to the background 9u/m3. I repeated the test frying a breakfast without a lid on the pan, that produced about 450u/m3 but the spike was for less time than Henry vacuum. In the report they used % rather than numbers so a really bad stove putting out 100% more particles sounds shocking but would still only be 22u/m3.
It’s quite a distorted picture they represent, so far no ban or newspaper articles on do not vacuum your house with an unsealed vacuum like Henry’s. (Henry do now make a HEPA version with an expensive £100 extra price tag for the filter, which needs frequent replacement. )
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Not necessarily true, it does depend on air leakage more than anything else. Whilst I understand where you are coming from some heating guys have put heat pumps in stone Welsh cottages, Scottish stone houses etc. it needs a proper heat loss calculation in order to work out if it’s viable rather than a blanket it won’t work. Reported cases of bad installations are everywhere and that’s a blight on the industry.
@ RicePudding A brilliant book, have had a copy for a few years.
Bit niche though
Andy
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We had an old house (1700’s) and heat pump worked just fine. The source used should make little difference if system is designed and operated properly. We had to change behaviour slightly as heat pumps don’t provide instant heat.
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‘Restrictive’ is an understatement – let’s just say you have to have a real love of life to cope with the reality of pollution on a daily basis, and the respiratory and, above all, neurological problems it causes me! I did consider isolating myself in the middle of nowhere, but that’s where there are the most wood fires – all year round!
Unfortunately for you, this only affects you (and the tiny number of others with similar conditions) so no-one else will notice.
Thank you for these measurements – they’re very interesting. A long time ago, I’d considered buying Henry because of his cute face (I was hoping that would encourage my children to help me with the housework ). In the end, I went for a Dyson. But now I’ve gone back to a bagged vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter, as I realised I was breathing in what I’d vacuumed up every time I emptied the Dyson!
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I suppose it depends on what temperature you want to achieve.
If you throw enough electricity at it and have multiple heat pumps then I suppose you could get it to work.
I just don’t think it would be very efficient with ground floor room temperatures set at 23 degrees.
Yes always best to be up windy of a Dyson or similar type canister vacuum whilst emptying.
More like a fault in the brainflow mix if you ask me.
I came to know the building quite well when it was privately owned and so was rather surprised about the arrangements for installing the pellet burner decided upon by the Mairie. The burner is on the ground floor, but the large canvas pellet hopper is in the cellar. The cellar is damp, and this is evidenced by the pools of water that appear on the dirt floor after a rainy spell. In fact there was a considerable trail of mud from the workmen’s boots in and out of the building at the time the hopper was installed. The ventilation always was insufficient, but now it is virtually nil as the council blocked up the two small ground level ventilation apertures to stop the rain getting in !!
So now the maintenance chaps turn up every 3 or 4 months to unblock the pipes that carry the pellets under forced air up to the boiler, and the whole thing smokes continuously whenever it fires up.
Clearly no-one ever told the Mairie that wood pellets are water absorbent and / or that damp pellets don’t burn well.
Seems that observation and logic are not exactly strong points where our esteemed commune council is concerned.
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Careful with that word, it could still be very efficient 450x the input energy but not be very effective. It’s often down to the size of the emmiters, balanced against the heat loss. Hence why under floor heating works so well as it’s a large emmiter at a low temperature but can easily maintain 23c. Contrast that against a small radiator at 70c struggling to warm a room. It’s why you need the services of a heating engineer and not relying on a plumber. (Of course it’s doable DIY with the various heat loss on line calculators, Heat Punk being one that’s quite well liked). In the UK, badly installed systems barely reach 300% efficient and with our stupid electricity prices that is more than gas costs so people’s bills rise. Also a couple of people I have spoken to have run their heat pumps like boilers, on for a few hours then off until the evening cycle comes on, low and slow is how they are meant to run, so once your thermal mass achieves 23c you get a low energy steady state, minus of course the important heat loss. That part is key to the whole equation working.
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More dumb feckery committees, well who would have guessed
There are times when I find this forum most enlightening.
I’d always wondered somewhat about some of the restrictions placed upon me during the rebuild of my immune system. One of them being that not only was I not allowed to be in a room that was being vacuumed, but the windows of that room had to be left wide open for at least 30 minutes before I was permitted to re-enter that room.
So I’d like to say “Thank you” to @Corona and others for revealing the reason behind it all.
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