Heating your home with a wood stove this winter? Now is a good time to ensure your wood stove will generate as much heat as possible while protecting your family's health. Wood smoke is a mixture of gases and particles, also called particle pollution, that isn't healthy to breathe indoors or out, especially for children, older adults and people with heart disease, asthma and other lung diseases. Particle pollution can irritate your respiratory system, and is linked to health problems such as bronchitis and asthma attacks. Replacing your wood stove with a model certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can make a big difference. About 75 percent of the 12 million wood stoves used in the U.S. were built before 1990. These stoves put out about 70 percent more wood smoke than the EPA-certified stoves on the market today. These older stoves are also about half as efficient as today's models, meaning you have to burn a lot more wood in your old stove to get the same amount of heat. More