Mainers are keeping their wood stoves well fed this winter, and that’s a good thing, for the most part. It means less oil drilling, refining and burning and more energy dollars for a local, renewable resource, among other things.

The down side is that many of those wood stoves are old, inefficient and dirty. Newer stoves – those certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – are designed to burn the fuel and the emissions more completely so that they put fewer fine particles into the air. As older stoves are replaced with newer ones, the air is getting cleaner. But it’s a slow process.

Here’s a story we ran this month about the return to wood, and the risks.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, wants to speed the transition to cleaner stoves and introduced legislation Wednesday for a $500 tax incentive. Under the bill, a family that replaces a dirty, old stove with a new, efficient one – they can easily cost $1,500 or more – would have their federal tax bill reduced by $500.

In her weekly column sent out last week, Collins said there are about 10 million wood stoves nationwide and as many as 75 percent of those are old and inefficient .

“These new wood and wood pellet stoves, which have been certified as clean-burning by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1992, can cut emissions by more than 70 percent and use as much as a third less firewood for the same amount of heat.... Making the change from an old, dirty, and inefficient wood stove to a modern, clean and safe stove is, however, an expensive undertaking, one that is especially difficult for many families today.”

A tax credit could be a tough sell, but we'll see it goes. In the meantime, operating a wood stove properly can also cut emissions, no matter how old it is. Here are tips from the Maine DEP for making any stove cleaner and more efficient.

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