If you sat down to design a more environmentally unfriendly product, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something worse than a patio heater. Ten years ago, these were relatively rare in Ireland, but with the upsurge of ‘decklanders’ aspiring to virtually year-round al fresco dining, they are now commonplace up and down the country.
And one of the unintended consequences of Micheal Martin’s smoking ban in 2002 has been a dramatic upsurge in the use of ever more elaborate outdoor heating systems by hotels, pubs and restaurants all over the country.
The Eagle House pub in the South Dublin village of Glasthule, for example, has recently opened an entire smokers deck area, partially enclosed, with probably a dozen space heaters blasting warm air down on the smokers below. It even has furniture, so the smokers can take their ease under the warm rays of the space heaters.
The smoking ban is more recent in the UK, but the effect is equally dramatic. A British Gas survey published last year found that the smoking ban in pubs in Scotland, adopted in March 2006, had led to an enormous increase in use of the heaters, as they were bought to warm outside areas where smokers were still permitted to puff.
Half of all pubs in Scotland bought at least one patio heater after the ban, and many bought several. British Gas estimated that at least 40,000 new patio heaters would be bought by English pubs for the smoking ban south of the border, which came in on 1 July last.
Just how bad are patio heaters? The average heater emits about 50kg of CO2 per year. If you take an average medium-sized car, it emits around 150 grams of carbon per kilometre. Therefore, it’s the equivalent of driving your car an extra 300 km a year.
That doesn’t sound so bad, but if you have, say 100,000 patio heaters in circulation in Ireland (compared to 1.3 million in the UK), that’s the equivalent of an extra 30 million km. Now you can see why the environmental lobby is getting so hot under the collar about space heaters.
“It’s difficult to conceive of an article that inflicts more gratuitous damage on the environment than a patio heater,” says Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth. “They just blaze energy out into the open air. Given what we know about climate change, they’re just not justifiable”. And that’s putting it politely.
What makes this all highly topical is that earlier today the European Parliament voted to back a report calling on a timetable to phase out patio heaters entirely.
This correspondent admits to having a patio heater out the back. It’s now covered in cobwebs, and it’ll stay that way. The best advice for anyone who really, really wants to sit out the back in the Irish climate is: put on your woolly jumper.
there’s lots of completely needless appliances around, and yes space heaters are a pretty blatant example, but what about leaf blowers??? Did you ever see anything so daft as using a petrol engine to push a few leaves around, when a simple brush does the same job, only better.