That antique potbelly stove may be charming, but it's not doing much to heat your home or help the environment.
One Sunshine Coast group is offering a program to make woodstoves cleaner and more efficient and drastically reduce particulate they release in the air.
The Sunshine Coast Clean Air Society (SCCAS) is spearheading the Great Sunshine Coast Woodstove Exchange program to offer $250 rebates to residents willing to get rid of their old, inefficient woodstoves and replace them with ones certified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Canadian Standards Association (CSA).
"The main purpose, of course, is to clean our air, because if you have a woodstove that's pre-1994 and it's not an EPA or CSA approved stove, it's basically operating at a 30 per cent efficiency rate or less," said Nadi Fleschhut, the SCCAS co-ordinator for the exchange program. "The stoves coming out nowadays have an increased efficiency and decreased pollution of 70 to 90 per cent. If you're only getting 30 per cent fuel efficiency for all the wood you're putting in there, that means more work and more money for you and less heat for your home."
Fleschhut said the new stoves put about two to five grams of particulate into the air per hour compared to 15 to 30 grams in older stoves. She said if all 100 vouchers are used, it will amount to noticeably cleaner air on the Sunshine Coast.
"Assuming we're just replacing wood burning stoves with other wood burning stoves, that's nearly 6,000 kilograms less particulate matter in the airshed per burning season," she said.
The SCCAS is able to offer the program after being given grants from the Ministry of Environment and the British Columbia Lung Association.
The Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) and the District of Sechelt (DoS) are also both in on the project. The SCRD is assisting with advertising while the DoS partnered with the SCCAS in applying for the grants and is offering an additional $100 for the first 30 people who apply for the vouchers within Sechelt. DoS is also waiving the permitting fees for installing the new stoves.
Residents can get their vouchers from most woodstove retailers on the Sunshine Coast or directly from Fleschhut, but they must show that they have purchased an approved woodstove, sign a pledge committing to clean air and burning wood "smart" and commit to disposing of the old woodstoves properly.
For that, the SCCAS has agreements with Gibsons Recycling Depot and Direct Disposal in Sechelt to take old stoves free of charge as long as the firebricks have been removed.
Ultimately, Fleschhut said, the program will help people sustain the clean, rural lifestyle and air that drew them to the Sunshine Coast in the first place.
She said if they are able to give out all 100 vouchers, the SCCAS can continue the program again and ideally change out every inefficient woodstove on the Coast.
"You want this rural lifestyle and part of that is having a woodstove. It's a romantic source of heat. It's also a sensible source if we have issues with power lines down and so on. It can be a really great self-sustainable thing," she said.
For a voucher or more information, contact Fleschhut at [email protected].
