it costs me about $5 a day no matter how cold out and still keeps the house at 75deg. what i like best is the constant temperature, no up and down like my fuel oil heater.
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 ...
Regards using coal in the home. Need a heavy cast iron stove, with a heavy iron grate at the bottom. Thin walled contraptions may in fact melt, or catch surrounding stuff on fire. On really cold days when we had the stove stoked, we could light cigs off the sides of the stove, as it would glow when the light was turned off. That's what 18 year olds do when they have unlimited coal, and have nothing to do but stand by.
it costs me about $5 a day no matter how cold out and still keeps the house at 75deg. what i like best is the constant temperature, no up and down like my fuel oil heater.
If your fireplace is enclosed and emits no carbon monoxide into the house you should be able to burn it. It has been, and probably still is, burned in open fireplaces.
Not a bad use of jailbirds.
But nobody burns pine around here, except to start a fire.
LOL - ah, to be an 18-yo soldier again.
While your point is well made, the old wood burning stoves of my youth would glow red also and would tend to melt out(actually rust out and decay from the heat)eventually, the newer ones prevent that and probably would make excellent coal burners. When I was stationed in Germany, when we went to Graf, we used coal for heat, it works great.
I actually had an oil burning stove rust out and more or less desolve from the heat once, of course it was a very old stove.
I miss Grafenwoehr, dang it.
This story makes me want to convert my city of Chicago gas-boiler back to coal-fired.
I can feel my leftie neighbors’ heads exploding.
Most folks I know, here in central PA (anthracite territory), use coal, and they all swear by it. Our house had a new oil furnace when we bought it, so we use oil, but the old coal furnace is still down there. I’d consider switching if not for the old chimneys here, they might not be able to deal with it. Coal’s cheap when you’re in a valley surrounded by big black mountains! :)
I have a couple of farrier friends, and they have all switched propane from coal fired, primarily due to the soot, smell, and outright mess. However, to a man, they complain that the iron just does not get as hot, hence not as soft, as with the coal furnace.
If a coal fire gets a good draft, the metal it is in contact with gets white hot. The cheaper grates used in homes nowadays usually need to get replaced every few years due to distortion and collapse. They would likly flat melt to the bottom of the stove or fireplace with a good coal fire, hence a more sturdy grate or basket is the ticket.
As far as anyone who wishes to burn coal, go for it, it does burn much hotter. I just ask that you consider the increased heat, and how it gets dissapated, cause fires late at night are really a drag. Been there, done that, and don't wish it on anyone.
Happy new year.
Funny how little tihngs, like, Oh I don’t know...staying warm and eating can derail a deranged environmental movement.
Funny thing it, it is the hard work, inventiveness, and capitalist society that has led to their being warm and fat, hence have too much time on their hands, so they wish to look for idiotic stuff to perpetrate on you.
Make sure your chimney is in good shape if you switch to coal. Make sure frequently if you’re burning pine to start up in the fireplace.
Or how many people might just go up to Grandpa’s old cabin or even exposed coal seams on the side of the road with picks and shovels and not breathe a word about it.
Masonry firebox/Chimney, had it lined with steel when I had the Hampton installed.
The Hampton is something else - weighs about a metric ton, I think.
yup... i live near Seneca lake in western NY.
Coal and corn cobs. That’s how my Grandma’s farmhouse in Iowa was heated, probably up into the Seventies, at least.
The cobs burned quick and real hot so the coal would catch. Back then they still picked corn, and shelled out of the corn crib. So, there was an almost unlimited supply of cobs. That was before everyone started using combines, which shell the corn as they go through the field and shred the cobs before dropping them back on the ground.
I’ve learned a lot about home heating from this thread — thanks. Maybe some Freepers would also be interested in an NYT story http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html about “Houses With No Furnace but Plenty of Heat” that are so well-insulated that they don’t require any type of furnace.
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