David Agar is a native of Vancouver Island and now lives in Central Finland.

While growing up, part of my seasonal chores at home was to split and stack firewood for our woodstove. I can say now that at the time I wasn’t particularly fond of this activity but then again, I never liked olives back then either. Things change, and when I moved to Finland little did I know that my appreciation of wood heating was about to get serious.

If you’ve ever been roaming the north during the chilly season you’ve probably seen a heat storing fireplace called takka in Finnish. These ceramic furnaces have been used in the Nordic countries since the 18th century. They are massive and often stylish constructs of brick or stone located at the heart of the Finnish home.

In the basic fireplace design, the exhaust gases and smoke circulate at least once around the firebox via vertical channels in the furnace before entering the base of the chimney. Wood burns with long flames and the longer path allows more complete burning of the fuel and more heat to transfer to the furnace and chimney walls. With well-dried wood and proper stoking the efficiency of the takka can be as high as 85 per cent.

For comparison, in the traditional open-hearth fireplace or simple stove, where smoke rises directly into the chimney and out of the house, only about 10-15 per cent of the wood’s heating value is utilised. This is due to the fact that most of the wood actually exits the chimney as smoke particles or collects on the inner surface waiting to ignite in a chimney fire if not cleaned away.

In addition to the economic benefits and cosiness of wood heating, it has other advantages. It’s a local resource, meaning that it need not be transported from afar to its point of use. This provides energy security since supply need not depend on importation, large-scale transport or foreign politics. As a fuel, wood is easy to handle and store without the need for expensive or complex technologies. Additionally, households can take part in the preparation of their own firewood if they so desire, which further reduces fuel costs and provides healthy exercise (which people actually pay for these days).

The use of wood is also desirable based on the science of climate change. As a fuel, wood is carbon dioxide neutral since when it is burnt, only the carbon dioxide collected during its growth is released back into the atmosphere. In the last decade some 80 per cent of new Finnish homes have a takka. But still, in an age where people are so eager to change their light bulbs to avert a climate disaster, I wonder why takka technology does not receive greater attention in energy policy.

These days harvesting wood fuel is actually my hobby. Each time I light our fireplace I smile and think of the hours I spent preparing firewood back home so that most of it could exit the chimney. "It builds character," my father used to say. And while he now enjoys electric heating in his house, he visited Finland last summer and we got to build a little bit of character together. This time, however, it won’t go up in smoke.