Today the Alliance for Green Heat announced the Firewood Community Safety Initiative, to help communities address wood heating safety issues. The initiative is funded by a three year grant from USDA’s Wood Education Research Center.
“Wood heating, when done well, is an important renewable energy”, said John Ackerly, President of the Alliance for Green Heat. “This new initiative will provide safe wood heating resources and strategies suitable for wood burning communities”
According to the Rural Energy Consumption Survey approximately 10-13 million U.S. households use wood heat. Wood stoves have long been at the forefront of reducing fossil fuels in rural, lower-income homes. Unfortunately, many households use old, inefficient and poorly maintained wood stoves that leak smoke inside and outside of the home.
The Firewood Community Safety Initiative is aimed at any firewood bank or high wood burning town. Those who participate will receive technical assistance from AGH staff to improve the safety of low-income homes who heat with wood. A free toolkit, including smoke detector, indoor air sensor, educational resources and other items, is available for towns and firewood banks who sign up for the initiative.
One of the first communities the Alliance is working with is the Hopi tribe who want to put air quality monitors in each school to educate students about indoor air PM2.5 concentrations. After taking readings in their classroom, each student will take the monitor home for a few days and take readings in the room with their wood stove so they can see the difference. Almost all homes on the Hopi reservation rely on wood or coal and they hope to identify dangerous stoves and find funding to replace them.
The initiative will also include periodic webinars and other educational activities. The next webinar is "Common Problems and Solutions with Self-Installed Wood Stoves" on Oct, 17 at 1:00 - 2:30 EST.
The initiative is part of a larger program that provides small grants to firewood banks to help them serve low income homes who can’t afford to heat their homes. To date, the Alliance for Green heat has provided over 100 grants to tribes, churches, towns, non-profits, and volunteer groups that run firewood banks.
The Firewood Community Safety Initiative is made possible by a grant from the Wood Education Center at the USDA Forest Service.
To sign up your firewood bank or community, please fill out the form here.
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