New York Outdoor Wood Boiler regulations

[webbie]

Ha, with Lees post, I think I am in Green Acres - ah, the age old fight between the city mouse and the country mouse.

Call me a country mouse with some city sensibilities.......

Sad thing about regulations is that you always end up taking SOME of the good with the bad, but on balance you have to get it right...and try to be fair. If said Dairy Farmer is really a numerous case, then maybe you can can simply have exceptions when no neighbors are within X distance, or when the neighbors sign off on it (like zoning).

Ain't many OWB that are going to smell MORE than a muddy dairy lot or a field of freshly spread green manure! Ah, the smell of ammonia on a summer morn.......

Reminds me of a friend that tried to build a house on their horse farm - about 100 acres. The regs were strict where we lived due to a state/national park nearby, so he got held up for a year. Finally one day when they were questioning him about the septic, he blurted out "Hey Guys, there are 25 horses shitting and pissing on that field every day". Sort of put it in perspective. The approved the house.

 

[JustWood]

Ha, with Lees post, I think I am in Green Acres - ah, the age old fight between the city mouse and the country mouse.

Call me a country mouse with some city sensibilities.......

Sad thing about regulations is that you always end up taking SOME of the good with the bad, but on balance you have to get it right...and try to be fair. If said Dairy Farmer is really a numerous case, then maybe you can can simply have exceptions when no neighbors are within X distance, or when the neighbors sign off on it (like zoning).

Ain't many OWB that are going to smell MORE than a muddy dairy lot or a field of freshly spread green manure! Ah, the smell of ammonia on a summer morn.......

Reminds me of a friend that tried to build a house on their horse farm - about 100 acres. The regs were strict where we lived due to a state/national park nearby, so he got held up for a year. Finally one day when they were questioning him about the septic, he blurted out "Hey Guys, there are 25 horses shitting and pissing on that field every day". Sort of put it in perspective. The approved the house.

LOL " So Mr. Joe Blow health Dept. guy , how would you like your POO , on top of the ground or in the ground " HA ,ya gotta love the mentality!

 

[Rick Stanley]

I think Slick, NY is down rt 17(I-86) someplace, but I've been told not to go there by reputable sources.....

I imagine when actual regulations are on the books, the DEC "fish cops" (as my former State Trooper neighbor affectionately referred to them) won't be handing out arbitrary tickets. And, once again, this will hasten people's move towards wood gassification, especially when they start going through MORE wood when they try to burn nice dry stuff in their OWBs. New regs didn't eliminate wood stoves, and they won't eliminate the use of wood. NYS would have to spend so much extra $$ to subsidize home heating oil for "in need" residents -especially within the blue line and in more rural upstate areas (read: less affluent)- that it would create a deficit even Albany couldn't live with. I'm not a politician, not a dealer of OWBs, and most certainly not a genius, but I'm sure that the end result of this will be one that most New Yorkers will live with. Just think of all the new "green" business that may come about in the HVAC industry. We might see some real innovation, I/O having smoke blown............

Chris

-may or may not be worth 2 cents

HA, "Fish Cops" I love it!! Thought that was a Maine thing. Game Wardens are called that here at times.

 

[Telco]

Neat read, how it's evolved since my last post last week! I'm putting this in based on comments about peak oil made shortly after my last posting.

WARNING This post will piss people off. Please stay civil even if you disagree.

The idea that we only have 30 years of oil left is a bit of incorrect thinking. What gets left off this is we have 30 to 40 years of VERIFIED crude left. The thing is, there has only been 30 to 40 years of verified crude in the ground since the 1800s. The oil companies only search out oil until they've verified 40 years or so, then they stop looking until the supply has fallen to 30 years. The idea is that 30 years is a long time, and verifying more than this costs money, so they only look to a point. Plus, it perpetuates the idea of there only being so much available.

I'd have to wonder how much longer oil is going to be an issue anyway. There are a couple of articles I refer to, one being (broken link removed to http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080322/ap_on_bie/military_coal;_ylt=Ar.5gTlJShqMV58fF1yOEAms0NUE) moving to get a coal to liquid fuel process going as they wish to go domestic with their fuel sources for national security. Nice thing about this is, only 15 percent of the output of a coal liquification plant is suitable for jet fuel so they will have to find a market for the 85 percent that would burn just great in a diesel engine. Another nice thing, is that being that they are offering up land on existing Air Force bases for NEW plants, these new plants will have to meet the latest and greated environmental standards. The Air Force also states that they intend to keep this as green as possible, as federal regs state that any non-petroleum source of fuel must be at least as green and preferably greener than the petroleum it replaces.

The other article is this one about a company that is making petroleum, not diesel or ethanol but actual petroleum indistinguishable from the stuff in the ground from e.coli bacteria. Yep, you crap it and they are making crude oil out of it. They said that the normal excrement of e.coli is only a few molecular bonds away from petroleum in its natural state, so they tweaked a few genes and now the little buggers are crapping crude. This second article brought to mind some other articles that I've read (no links to them, unfortunately) that stated that the oil industry has pumped fields dry, capped them off, then rechecked them a few years later to find them full again. They said at the time that it must have seeped in from other areas, but what if bacteria crap exposed to pressure and heat is what crude oil is? If the excrement from e.coli is a few bonds away from being crude, and heat and pressure are well known ways of making molecular bonds, then the idea that crude is a renewable resource is not a wild one. If this is the case, then we will never run out of crude, because it is constantly being made by bacteria in the ground. This means that the stuff has a lot less value than it did when it was thought to be a finite resource. Yet another reason to let people think that peak oil is here. Keep the people worked up and jack the prices up. I've been hearing for the last 30 years that we only have 30 years of oil left. If this was true, then we should be out on April 1 2008, not 30 years from now.

I'm by no means a Big Oil advocate, I just think that panic costs everyone. And, we've been in a needless sustained panic over oil for the last 10 years. Only the oil industry has profited from the panic, to the tune of billions of dollars a quarter. At the rate they are going, in another 10 years they'll have all the money.

 

[stihlgoin]

Tom Libbous and George (Ithinks) Winner are the locals down here.......I think Libbous has some clout, but I don't know why I think that

Chris

 

[webbie]

Neat read, how it's evolved since my last post last week! I'm putting this in based on comments about peak oil made shortly after my last posting.

WARNING This post will piss people off. Please stay civil even if you disagree.

The idea that we only have 30 years of oil left is a bit of incorrect thinking.

I'm by no means a Big Oil advocate, I just think that panic costs everyone. And, we've been in a needless sustained panic over oil for the last 10 years. Only the oil industry has profited from the panic, to the tune of billions of dollars a quarter. At the rate they are going, in another 10 years they'll have all the money.

I don't think anyone is either pissed or would disagree with these statements

There are hundreds of years of oil left. And there will probably be a lot o liquid fuels (bio) after that point.

The point might be that there is no CHEAP oil left. Think of it like airplane seats. They sell the first 10% for one price, the next 25% for another - and when the plane is 75% full, what does the "market" do?

My lack of education tells me that the airport should advertise cheap seats in the last 6-8 hours before the flight takes off to fill it....but, no, they would rather sell two expensive seats.....

So the oil market may have temporary gluts and plenty of supply, but deep down they know the cost of war, drilling and all the other stuff. Moreover, they know the cost of you or I trying to do the same work (heat) with other forms of energy. So oil and gas at $3.00 are still a bargain.

In NY State...as per this thread, a lot of people use wood for heating - it is cold, and people in the rural areas are not wealthy. It would break the bank for them to spend $3000 to $5000+ on fuel oil. Maybe someday we will have more efficient and smaller homes, but right now that does not help much.

Of course, the same economics would speak out against people having systems that are 25% efficient and that burn out in 5-8 years (older water stoves). So once again I think the writing is on the wall - more expensive, but much better, appliances to burn the wood in. This will solve the smoke and the efficiency problems.

 

[JustWood]

I can't wait for "peak wood" then maybe I'll have a fat bank account at the end of the year ! LOL

 

[Telco]

Heh heh... well, you never know what you'll stir up when making posts about peak oil being a fallacy on any kind of alternative fueling board. There's a lot of folks that don't like finding that their soap box has M-A-N-U-R-E written on the side. I also feel that global warming being caused by man is another made for order panic situation, seeing as we still don't even know what all the environmental drivers are. We also only have written weather logs for just over 100 years and only have reliable weather logs for 50 years. Now pollution is a cause to get behind, because there's no doubt that man pollutes, just look at the air in the LA Basin. This is something that is provable. Nice thing about eliminating the pollution, if man is causing global warming then this would eliminate that problem without spending billions proving it. Put that money into cleaning the pollution instead. To me, Global Warming is just the latest scam to separate people from their money, as I remember reading articles about the next Ice Age in the 70s. When nobody cared about colder weather, they went the other way. The GW advocates are claiming that the Greenland ice shelf is melting from man's pollution, but geologists found (broken link removed) that would be heating the water right as the North Atlantic Loop waters are making their pass along the Artic. Did man make this volcano by driving SUVs? No, but you don't ever hear about things like this.

 

[webbie]

Global Warming is a good intro to the general pollution problem for the masses. A rallying cry - so I'm all for it. It is a lot harder to get folks behind the idea of stopping coal plants by telling them there are 137 chemicals in the air or water.......or, more recently, that we all have pharmaceuticals in our drinking water.

Very few people in this world look beyond the next couple months or years.....that is probably programmed into us - not to look far ahead.

It is hard for anyone to argue against efficiency and cleanliness of air, water and soil. So I'm hanging my hat there.

 

[JustWood]

Global Warming is a good intro to the general pollution problem for the masses. A rallying cry - so I'm all for it. It is a lot harder to get folks behind the idea of stopping coal plants by telling them there are 137 chemicals in the air or water.......or, more recently, that we all have pharmaceuticals in our drinking water.

Very few people in this world look beyond the next couple months or years.....that is probably programmed into us - not to look far ahead.

It is hard for anyone to argue against efficiency and cleanliness of air, water and soil. So I'm hanging my hat there.

Web ,you're only half right. Most people dwell on the past. "I remember when ______ was $_______" LOL

 

[Telco]

Good luck with it, keep up the good fight. If these folks get a toe-in with any state on any whackjob regulations, the rest of the states usually fall like dominoes in the courts.

I'd suggest that you start pressing your elected reps to not only shoot this new reg down, but kick these folks out of their jobs. If they don't get this passed in its current form, they will immediately try again with a modified version knowing that their opponents have to spend time and money being vigilant and fighting these regs, while they are doing their normal 9-5 job trying to push them through. You won't truly win the war unless you can get them thrown out and get some pro-wood people installed in their places.

 

[JustWood]

It was strongly suggested by an elected official that with the Spitzer regime over, his appointed henchperson, Enck may well be finding herself in quicksand. Stay tuned. Your instincts and suggestion iare right on.

"GOOD NEWS, GOOD NEWS ! Roscoe caught the Duke boys !"

 

[webbie]

It would have been nice if the links in the article actually worked, but they did not for me.

FYI, the national EPA regs for woodstoves started in New York State, and I am sure there was a big brohaha over that too! I'm gonna have to do a poll and find out how many OWB users are first generation country boys........maybe, like, from NYC before that! I knew a heck of a lot of transplants who were wood burners up near warrensburg.

City mouse vs country mouse - the timeless struggle! It is still being fought in many places - over stills!

 

[JustWood]

It would have been nice if the links in the article actually worked, but they did not for me.

FYI, the national EPA regs for woodstoves started in New York State, and I am sure there was a big brohaha over that too! I'm gonna have to do a poll and find out how many OWB users are first generation country boys........maybe, like, from NYC before that! I knew a heck of a lot of transplants who were wood burners up near warrensburg.

City mouse vs country mouse - the timeless struggle! It is still being fought in many places - over stills!

Born and raised in the foot hills of the Appalachia Mountains. Hillbilly I am. Redneck I'm not ,there is a big difference. My girl just moved here in December from Upper Manhattan, born and raised in San Fran. She walks around most of the time with her chin dragging on the ground saying What ...................?????????????? It's like she entered Bizzarro World. Never seen a cow milked,been on a hay ride, seen a swamp ,a bald eagle,or sipped a cold Appalachia Mountain Coors Light while watching deer graze from 50 yards.

Needless to say it is a different world for her. We have had some heated discussions about the way things are done around here and I've had to tell her to keep to herself so as not to offend someones way of life. Just sit back and learn.

We are a proud sort .We want to be left alone and settle our own differences. But when someone from the city moves here or we are led by politicians who steamroll us with unreasonable regulations don't expect us to lay down.

Our rural senators don't dream up unreasonable regulations that we expect NYC residents to live up to. As far as I'm concerned NYC should be goverened as a whole seperate state. I'm not against reasonable regs, I just ask Politicians to use common sense and have the greater good of the state in mind. "You do your thing ,I'll do mine"

 

[Telco]

Man that sucks. Sounds like you guys need more woolen socks and pointy rocks up there. Whap! Send them carpetbaggers home to the big city!

 

[JustWood]

Man that sucks. Sounds like you guys need more woolen socks and pointy rocks up there. Whap! Send them carpetbaggers home to the big city!

What we need is a hangmans platform at the edge of town as a forwarning to newcomers! Just like in the old days.

 

[webbie]

Are you saying that a NYC subway riding will not give up his seat for an old lady?

 

[catskills]

A couple years ago we had a dynamic minister in our church. People were coming far and wide to hear him . He was also a college professor and had a few friends come every sunday with him. At coffee hour after church I spoke with one of his friends-a tall lady from Austria. I told her that many people come from the the city to visit or maybe live here in the Catskills. Some of these people think we are nothing but hillbillies and unsophisticated. She thought for a second and replied-yes I can relate to your story. Back home in Austria we call those people Germans!!

 

[FLASHMAN]

We've been saying for years on this board that OWBs have been sowing the seeds of their own demise. Why does everybody seem so shocked when one of the most regulated states in the country decides to regulate them? It's not like we were all blindsided.

And my opinion, for what it's worth, is that you won't have cleaner-burning central heating appliances until they're required by law. It's a lot like what happed to woodstoves--just three decades late.

As a practical matter, I'm guessing that nobody who currently owns an OWB in NYS is going to have a legal problem unless they're creating a smoke problem. And I think that most of us would agree that that's as it should be.

Exactly.... There are laws in my home stat of CT on these... 200' from the nearest residence not served by the unit, and if within 500' of the nearest residence not served by the unit, the unit must have a chimney tall enough to extend beyond that building's roofline. That seems to be way more common sense than the NYS rules.

Also, in my very rural town, we have quite a few of these, I will have one soon as well. Most people in my town burn thiers' responsibly, with just some light wisps of smoke, never really see them chugging it out.

For those who don't do that, STOP IT!! You're making the rest look bad. Stack your wood, out of the rain, stop burning tires, garbage, deer carcasses, what the hell is the matter with you?!?!?!?!?!