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residential wood furnace use
nosteiner4me: Are you talking about your cold air return (the air that actually gets heated) or the air supply for combustion? Because if you're talking about the combustion air supply, that should come from outside if possible so that you're not making up the air from other, non-controlled sources such as gaps around windows and doors. If you have combustion products leaving the house via a chimney (which, hopefully you do!) you need to make up that air somewhere, hence the outside air intake. 
Regarding outdoor wood furnaces, the problem I see with them is that they are generally operated in a "smolder" mode a lot of the time; that is, a fire is kept at a low level, starved for oxygen by the damper. This will create more smoke to linger around. We use a indoor masonry heater in which you make smaller, more intense fires that burn quickly, heating a large thermal mass (rock). This then radiates heat through the house. It is definitely more work, however, as it requires building two fires a day. I understand that there are some outdoor furnaces available in Europe that also work by heating a large thermal mass and you burn them hot and relatively briefly.
The crux of your situation to me sounds more that these folks are apparently using their wood furnaces as garbage burners. I know in our township that wood furnaces are legal (except in town) but burning garbage is NOT.
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residential wood furnace use
When we built our place 3 years ago, we used Insulated Concrete Forms so we have a pretty tight house. The centrally located masonry stove that we fire twice a day has it's own 6" dia outside air inlet that I open and close when the fire is burning. The stove is hot to the touch for about 12 hours from a 1 hour fire (about 15lbs of firewood). In addition, we have a tiny cast iron stove in the walkout basement that we use when we're down there. It also has it's own fresh air inlet that we open when the stove is fired. You can really feel the air rushing through when the fire is burning. We do have a propane backup furnace which has a PVC pipe fresh air inlet as well as exhaust. It doesn't go on very often though. Finally, for indoor air quality, we do have an air-to-air heat exchanger. While we could run it continuously, we choose to run it periodically via switches in each bathroom; i.e., after a shower or whatever  you hit a button on the wall and the unit runs on max for about 20 minutes.
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residential wood furnace use
Well, we designed it as a passive solar house so it is pretty efficient. Plus we keep it pretty cool. When it's below about 10F or so outside overnight, the furnace will occationally kick in at 5am for a bump up to 68 so we don't have ice in the corn flakes. As much as I would have hoped, we can't quite heat it with a match and cool it with an icecube!
Anyhow, sorry for dragging this off-topic. To the original poster I would echo the suggestion that someone is burning trash that they shouldn't be and that's just not being a good neighbor. As much as we all hate to get the "guv-ment" involved, this may be one of those cases.
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12-27-2007, 09:21 
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