Many people are waking up to the fact that ever increasing fuel bills are not, after all, up there with death and taxes as an inevitable fact of life, and that there are a number of highly effective ways to reduce energy costs.

For example eliminating hideously wasteful incandescent light bulbs by switching to LED light bulbs (halogen lamps in particular are terribly costly to run and easily replaced by LED spotlights). Or indeed generate your own electricity or switch to using biomass heating.

Biomass what? Well, yes, apologies for that but it seems that’s the trendy new term for what is otherwise known as a wood burning stove (or log burner, or wood burning boiler or any other permutation you can think of). Certainly there are many benefits to be had by installing a log burner but as with fitting solar panels to your roof, it’s not for everyone and there can be issues (some of them potentially insurmountable).

If you live in a city, or indeed any reasonably built up area, then the questions start to stack up quite quickly. Firstly you are almost certainly going to discover that you live in a smoke control area, and secondly you may have a bit of a problem finding an affordable supply of suitable fuel.

The (not entirely accurately) acknowledged grandfather of them all, the Franklin wood burner, was designed for a time when people didn’t live cheek by jowl in crowded urban settings and chopping down a nearby tree was most unlikely to land you in deep trouble with your local Tree Protection Officer. And that lineage still shows through today, which is why you tend to find that wood burning stoves are more prevalent in rural areas where you can blow as much smoke as you like in the direction of your neighbour, since they’re most probably the other side of the conveniently situated forest.

But that’s not to say that it’s impossible to install a wood stove in an urban home, though you may have to jump through a few hoops and the cost savings won’t be there (it can in fact cost more in extreme cases). Your first stumbling block will be the aforementioned smoke control areas which, as the name suggests, restricts emissions of smoke from residential dwellings. But this is not by any means an insurmountable hurdle – so long as you are prepared to burn smokeless fuels in what is classified as an exempt appliance then you can burn away to your heart’s content. (For US readers then pretty much the same applies but you should check here instead).

The point about these low polluting fuels and burners is that because they are so efficient at combustion, they emit very, very little in the way of particulates and visible smoke. Most modern wood burners use a two stage process that re-ignites unburnt fuel and exhaust gases in a secondary combustion chamber – so very little waste is generated and of course you convert more of your original fuel into heat, hence saving money as well.

So to return to the original question, yes, you can install a log burner in a city home but it’s doubtful that you will derive much (if any) financial benefit simply because of the cost of obtaining suitable fuel. It’s not unlike mounting solar panels on the side of an apartment – not entirely useless but hardly optimal.

Also you should consider that your nice warm wood fire could have a chilling effect on relations with your neighbors. Sure you’re within legal emission limits, but that’s not even close to being the same as smoke free. So do think long and hard if you live in the smoke (sorry, terrible pun) and are tempted by the undoubted allure of a log burning stove.