Posted on 12/26/2008 3:34:28 PM PST by reaganaut1
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Aptly, perhaps, for an era of hard times, coal is making a comeback as a home heating fuel.
Problematic in some ways and difficult to handle, coal is nonetheless a cheap, plentiful, mined-in-America source of heat. And with the cost of heating oil and natural gas increasingly prone to spikes, some homeowners in the Northeast, pockets of the Midwest and even Alaska are deciding coal is worth the trouble.
Burning coal at home was once commonplace, of course, but the practice had been declining for decades. Coal consumption for residential use hit a low of 258,000 tons in 2006 — then started to rise. It jumped 9 percent in 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration, and 10 percent more in the first eight months of 2008.
Online coal forums are buzzing with activity, as residential coal enthusiasts trade tips and advice for buying and tending to coal heaters. And manufacturers and dealers of coal-burning stoves say they have been deluged with orders — many placed when the price of heating oil jumped last summer — that they are struggling to fill.
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The coal trend is consistent with steep increases in other forms of supplementary heating that people can use to save money — most of them less messy than coal. Home Depot, for example, reports that it has sold over 80,000 tons of pellet fuel, a sort of compressed sawdust, for the season to date. That is an increase of 137 percent compared with the same period last year, said Jean Niemi, a company spokeswoman.
Coal may never make economic sense in areas far from where it is mined. But in places within reasonable delivery range, the price tends to be stable, compared with heating oil or natural gas.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
A wood burning stove is ideal. I’m sure a fireplace is OK.
It smells bad and will melt most stove grates designed to burn wood.
You might be surprised at the tremendous advances in coal burning technology that really do significantly reduce pollutants, by increasing the efficiency of the stove. Wood burning stoves are in the high 70% for efficiency and emit a lot less particulate than the 4 grams per hour that’s allowed.
BTW...Presto Logs was a product of the old Pacific Lumber Co of Scotia Cal here in Humboldt County but they don't make them any longer. They may have sold the machines and name to someone else?
Unless they're cold, of course.
Oh, yes, coal burned in the fireplace most every winter in my first ten or twelve years. Then we switched to natural gas. Used a cast iron grate to hold the coal. Our's (still have it) actually had sides to form a rectangular box. Most of these say wood or coal: http://www.shopzilla.com/fireplace-accessories/coal-fireplace-grates/13020212/products
The few times I visited my granny in the Winter in backwoods, WV, the quilts and the waning coal fire in the stove made for the best sleep I’ve ever had in my life. The smell of the gases coming off the coal was soothing and familiar, if not exactly Yankee Candle. It would give way to the smell of wood cooking the biscuits in the iron oven in the morning before she had the coffee on and the eggs frying.
You can’t take that away from me, but it will go with me when I go.
That’s too bad, really.
Gak. Firewood is, um, free? Go to the I66/West Ox land fill, drive you PU up to the brush area, the old gentleman there will load all the wood you want on your truck with his tractor.
I love this thing. It keeps our 2400 square foot house at 75 deg on the first floor and about five degrees cooler on the second. If we hadn't put it in we would be paying about $5k/year right now for propane. I figure with the price of gas I'm saving about $30/day in gas when I use the fireplace.
We had a coal central heating system for the apartment building we owned in Chicago, it was a steam radiator system. Sucked. Too hot in some areas, cold in others. The coal was a mess to deal with. Initially my poor dad had to go down every couple of hours and shovel coal into the boiler like on the friggin Titanic. Later we got a stoker that did that automatically, once of course you filled it. Then you had to clean out the boiler of the “clinkers”, the residue from the coal. No thanks.
I have no idea of the BTU output, the whole idea here is to recycle and to use whats available to cut your fuel heating bills.
The environwackos will of course fart ducks if they heard about this and some cities have fireplace nazi patrols.
Things are going to get bad for those in the cities, consider yourself very fortunate if you do have a stove or fireplace and have the know how to cobble up your own logs, short of burning real ones that is.
With some simple items from a hardware store and some manual labor like our forefathers did its possible to heat a home during a winter without having to rely on more conventional fuels, it just requires work.
And that I sadly suppose is out of the question for some people.
Me, I live in Alaska, that is fortune enough, I can sympacise with some that are forced to live where they have to abide by laws about using a fireplace, if that was forced upon me I would move.
When we were in England outside of Cambridge for a year, back in the 1970s, we burned soft coal in the fireplace. There was no central heat in the house.
There was just a grate in the fireplace. You started the fire with a bit of kindling, and just fed soft coal to it from a bucket.
As long as you clean the chimney at regular intervals, which you should do anyway, I can’t see any problem with burning it in any good-drawing fireplace.
We have always lived in old houses, and several of them had coal cellars, where a truck could deliver down the chute so delivery and storage were easy. Then just carry it up daily in a coal bucket.
I also had some cousins who burned coal in their Franklin stove. If you have a wood stove you probably want to consult with someone as to whether you can burn coal in it. But as long as you have one of those thermometers on the stove pipe to monitor the temperature, I don’t really see why not.
I sold a 55 acre wood lot in 93 because I could buy wood cheaper then I could go get it...
Oddly enough, inside the Washington DC beltway, it is free for the taking.
Sawed into 16” logs.
You have to split it, of course. But, a one-day rental on a log splitter lasts six months, heating wise.
Oak, ash, elm, poplar, and cherry. All free.
I remember the coal chute. The truck would dump through a little window into the “coal room” next to the furnace. it was a good idea not to open the coal room door for about 12 hours.
After looking at the brochures for the unit you have, I wouldn’t be tossing coal in there without calling the company and just flat-out asking for their recommendation. Those are nice looking fireplaces - they might handle it - and they might not.
For as spendy as those units appear to be from what I see on their website, I’d be asking before doing something that might void the warranty.
What good is the warrenty on a wood stove?
After the house burns down, you think they will replace the stove?
Anyway, mine is a Hampton, and you can burn coal in it.
Just be careful. ;)
The inmates get points toward their probation. Mostly DUI convictions. The wood tends to be Monterey Pine, a trash wood that leaves a lot of ash...
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