Welsh invention prevents indoor pollution from wood burning stoves
A Welsh engineer from Cardiff has invented a new type of domestic woodburning stove to eliminate indoor pollution from wood burning stoves.
Marc Howell, who studied engineering at Cardiff University followed by years working as an engineer in the automotive and semiconductor industries, spent seven years working in his garage near Cowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan to perfect new patented technology that provides a real wood burning stove experience but without the risk of indoor air pollution.
This was the driving force for Marc, the founder of Island Pellet Stoves, who could not only see the benefits of sustainably heating a home with wood, but he could also see the potential conflict of its air quality impact on health.
“Burning wood just had to be made more efficient and less polluting” said Marc “through our experiences of reducing emissions from larger scale wood pellet systems we knew there was a way to create the real wood fire experience that is so desirable in the UK but yet do it cleanly and not at the cost of harming health’.”
Challenge
It was wood pellets that are manufactured from timber industry sawdust and are produced into dry, regular-shaped pellets containing less than 1% ash and less than 10% water that were the key to the challenge.
A computer-controlled stove, that automatically lights the wood pellets and controls the feeding of the pellets with precise levels of pre-heated air, allows greater control of the combustion process and was found to be the way to significantly reduce the emissions and increase the overall efficiency of using the energy from the wood pellet fuel.
The air used for burning the wood pellets is pre-heated to a high temperature by the exhaust gases using a “balanced flue” as is commonplace with domestic gas boilers.
The stoking or feeding of the pellets from the on-board storage hopper to the “burn-pot” is done automatically with a computer-controlled “Archimedes screw” and so there is no need to open the stove door during operation (as there would be with a log-burning stove) and so the risk of harmful pollutants entering the home is eliminated.
Welsh manufacturer
A recent report commissioned by DEFRA (The UK Government’s Department for Food and Rural Affairs) and published in Feb 2025 called “Emission Factors for Domestic Solid Fuels” has confirmed through their testing that the pellet stoves made by Island Pellet Stoves Ltd are around 20 times cleaner than a modern log-burner for emissions of particulates.
Marc, who considers himself simply a “man in the shed” inventor might just have cracked the problem so we can continue to enjoy wood-burning but without the harmful side-effects.
Island Pellet Stoves Ltd is the UK’s market leader in pellet stoves and proudly designs and manufactures its stoves in Wales.
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Its been around for a while nothing new and a complete wate of time.
USA has had this for decades. Pellet stoves are super common over there. I used to sell pellets by the yonne every day.
Have you ever invented something?
The problem is people buy wood burners to be cheap heating and then put old pallets, knackered creosoted fence panels, called timber, and any other literal or metaphorical old garbage they can find.
It’s not a bad idea in theory but if I’m going shell out for a clean stove I’d just buy an Everhot electric mini stove. It’s not as expensive, offers a mini oven, doesn’t have a flue that needs sweeping or as needing cleaning, and produces no emissions at the point of use.
It’s far from ‘not a bad idea’ in theory to burn treated, most especially, creosoted wood as it emits poisonous toxic chemicals including arsenic and is against the law! 😳
If you want truly clean wood burners, build yourself a rocket mass heater. It super heats the smoke to burn every combustible particle. Easy to feed, no need to clean as it gets so hot inside even the ash gets destroyed.
Unless it is 100% pollution free then it prevents nothing. Green washing nonsense which encourages poor air quality, ashamed of Nation Cymru for parroting a clearly false claim.