This comes up pretty frequently in fiction, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, for example, where people are trapped someplace with a fireplace but no firewood, so they break up wooden furniture and toss books on the fire to keep warm. This might be pretty safe with antiques, but most modern furniture is made with a lot of chemicals, and I assume books are treated with preservatives as well. I am thinking burning them might throw off toxic fumes along with any life-saving heat.
Yes? No? Would the fumes mostly leave with the smoke? What is safe to burn in this scenerio?
I don’t know about your grandpa, but mine shellacked the hell out of every stick of furniture that came his way. I wouldn’t burn any of it.
I understand your use of The Day After Tomorrow as an example, but it’s so scientifically inadequate and inconsistent that the idea of burning furniture and books is among the least of its problems.
What would be a better idea is to burn the wood framing of any upholstered furniture. It would not have been painted or shellacked and probably a nice sturdy wood.
Particle board, MDF and plywood all have glues and resins (notabley urea- or phenol-formaldehyde) in them that would tend to make for hazardous fumes when burned, releasing such lovely substances as formaldehyde and cyanide.
Naturally, almost all contemporary furniture now is made of nothing but these materials.
As **Ludy ** said, burn the frames of upholstered furniture - it’s likely to be something like maple or oak and unfinished.
Books are usually not treated with anything other than ink, so they’d be OK to burn. Just watch out for loose flying pages.
When growing up everybody in the city had an oil barrel in the backyard and burned absolutely everything. Plastic was the worst, and would stink up the neighbor’s clothesline.
We all lived, but perhaps are suffering in unnoticed ways.
The furnature would burn very nicely,a lot of those resins are petro based and would burn better (more energy) then wood. Paper OTHO is difficult to burn in mass form (books)
I agree with shoshana, under the circumstances you are not thinking about living until 90 worring about what causes cancer ; your thinking about living through the night. Otherwise tomorrow has no point.
My primary source of heat is wood. If a fireplace or wood heater is operating properly the smoke goes up the chimney. There is no “smoky smell” in our house.
I don’t think burning chemically treated wood, paper and so forth would cause a health hazard unless the outlet for the smoke became stopped up.
Pretty much yes. When these things burn the best way to do so usually is to burn with extra air and a hot fire, these break down the nasty stuff into water and CO2 (yes there are still some nasty stuff, but minimizes it). In a structure fire, until the fire obtains ventilation (either by burning through to the outside, or by firefighters cutting holes for that) the fire burns without enough oxygen and produces a lot of partial products of combustion (even from wood only), which are very hazardous - this also creates the backdraft situations, when these hot partials are in a O2 starved atmosphere are suddenly given fresh air, they autoignite.
