Joseph Tumidajewicz, top, of Chicopee, Mass., has pictures of a neighbor’s boiler. “You can feel your face getting instantly dirty,” he says. Neighbors say that they create smoke so thick that children cannot play outside, and that it seeps into homes, irritating eyes and throats and leaving a foul stench.

They have spawned a rash of lawsuits and local ordinances across the country. A report last year by the New York attorney general’s office found that they produce as much particle pollution in an hour as 45 cars or 2 heavy-duty diesel trucks. The devices, outdoor wood-fired boilers, originally invented to heat farmhouses, are now a fast-growing alternative energy fad — and, depending on whom you ask, the latest suburban scourge. Scientists studying the boilers’ environmental fallout estimate their numbers have doubled in the last two years, to about 150,000 nationwide.

A growing body of research about the toxins spewed by the boilers — namely carcinogens and lung-clogging particulate matter — has prompted campaigns around the country to limit their use. And next month, the Environmental Protection Agency expects to issue guidelines for states to follow in regulating the use of wood boilers. The industry, too, is working with the agency on new standards for boilers.

“These machines sound good when you buy them, but look at all the health problems you cause,” said Edward J. Nowak, who is suing his former neighbor in Chicopee, Mass., for creating a “public nuisance” by installing a boiler in his backyard. “We taped our windows up with plastic, and we tried to be a nice neighbor, but it just got to the point where it was impossible,” said Mr. Nowak, who is retired. He said he had to move because of the constant smoke.

“People are calling up their state and federal officials in unprecedented numbers because they don’t know what to do,” said Philip R. S. Johnson, a senior scientist at the Northeast States for Coordinating Air Use Management, a nonprofit association of air quality agencies in New York, New Jersey and New England. “I am getting so many calls from people complaining about their children getting sick and the nuisance of the smell, and it’s just brutal to listen to their stories.”

Owners of the devices say the complaints are unfair. Peter Muller, a landscaper in Stony Point, N.Y., who bought his boiler three years ago, calls them “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” “Every day you turn on the news they’re saying lower your dependence on foreign oil,” said Mr. Muller, who gets inexpensive wood through his business and estimates his savings at $400 to $600 a month in the peak heating season. “Now I have a renewable energy source, and people are complaining.”

Since 2001, at least 50 towns or counties in New York State have instituted laws regulating the boilers, including Suffolk County, which in November effectively banned them by prohibiting their operation within 1,000 feet of a home or school. Vermont, in the 1990s, and Connecticut, two years ago, enacted strict regulations on where boilers can be used. Washington State banned them outright, and villages and health boards in Maine, Wisconsin, Michigan and Massachusetts are dealing with hundreds of complaints from people who say wood boilers are making their homes feel like campgrounds.

The boilers, which look like tool sheds topped by 12-foot smoke stacks, were originally designed for rural areas where open space — and wood — are plentiful. They generally cost about $5,000, and work by burning wood to heat water that is pumped through underground pipes to a home’s plumbing and heating systems. The boilers are creating fierce disputes virtually everywhere they turn up.

Common complaints include lung inflammation, persistent coughing and trouble breathing, not to mention foul odors. Because the boilers operate under low-oxygen conditions and smolder constantly, they produce far more smoke than traditional indoor stoves — about a dozen times more, several studies have found. They also produce 4 to 12 times the amount of fine particles, which can easily move into the lungs and be absorbed into the bloodstream, causing heart and respiratory problems, according to researchers.

Joseph Tumidajewicz, another Chicopee resident, has a name for the boiler that a neighbor — not the same one as Mr. Nowak’s — installed 300 feet from his home: “the presence.” “You step outside of the house sometimes and you can feel your face getting instantly dirty,” he said. “It’s unbearable.” According to the New York attorney general, the burners produce particles that are 2.5 microns in diameter or less. A human hair measures 30 to 50 microns. But because regulations governing them are scarce, towns that receive complaints often have no recourse other than to politely ask owners to shut them off.
(By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, New York Times, 18/12/2006)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/nyregion/18wood.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin