yup, sure sounds like ny to me... i don't know how they determine the taxes round here cause two years ago they damn near doubled the assessed value of my home yet my tax bill went down like six dollars. go figure.
Posted on 12/26/2008 3:34:28 PM PST by reaganaut1
...
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.
...
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 ...
yup, sure sounds like ny to me... i don't know how they determine the taxes round here cause two years ago they damn near doubled the assessed value of my home yet my tax bill went down like six dollars. go figure.
It depends, but unless you know for sure, you should assume not. It will burn much hotter than wood, and modern suburban fireplaces and chimneys aren't designed for that kind of heat. And older fireplaces should be carefully checked prior to considering coal.
When I was a kid, one of the neighbours ran a hair-styling studio down the street, and burned the hair once a week. Occasionally, the smoke hung about, bringing to mind the German ovens.
I have never smelled such stench since, gratefully, although a rotten bear came close.
OTOH, some people just can't get along without their daily creosote fix. Why, it's downright FUN sweeping chimneys and cleaning out wood-ranges...NOT!
The kitchen stove both wood & coal grates, and I have finally talked the wife into letting me buy coal.
Feed store/elevator in the next town sells it, and a couple of tons would go a long way in helping out night burn times, as well as providing considerably more heat than the mainly pine we have available on the ranch.
Reason they have coal there, but here, is the coal trains run through them, and BNSF has a small yard there.
Any tips about coal for a life long wood burner?
BTW, I also have a firebrick lined airtight, but no grates for it...any hope?
I grew up in a small town and coal was used everywhere until the natural gas lines were laid. One small junior high school that had a auditorium/gym combination, had a pot belly stove for heat in one corner just over the edge of the basketball court. Also used to heat the schools, old steam radiator systems with coal furnaces. It gives off quite a bit of heat in a fireplace. More than wood as I recall.
Yea, that was the one special consideration of wood that I was thinking of when thinking “Ya know... coal just doesn’t give you the same experience as wood... the chimney fires... that roar of a supercharger in your smokestack... that flames shooting 10’ out the top of your chimney...”
The biggest tip about coal I have is this: determine what type of coal you have. Not all coal is interchangeable.
Here’s a great USGS map (about 7MB to download) which provides a pretty detailed map of coal deposits in the US, along with a very nice, detailed graphic interpretation of the heating value, carbon content and sulphur content of the various widely found coals in the US.
When you know what you have for your locally available coal (and if you’re getting it somehow via BNSF, it could come from any one of a number of large deposits, most especially including coal out of eastern WY - the Powder River Basin area, and Montana - right there, you have at least two different types of coal.
Once you know what type of coal you’re dealing with, then you can look up the particular characteristics of the coal. If it is a product of major mines, or was transported by BNSF, you likely can find the detailed specs for the coal on-line.
With that information in hand, plus the price, you can now start to compare it to wood as a fuel on a cost basis if you have a decent idea of what type of wood you’re burning. As you know, not all wood is created equally either. Hickory is great firewood, as is pinyon pine. Elm, however, just plain sucks as a firewood, and many pines/conifers are fast, flashy fuel that coats your chimney with tars and creosote, leaving little coals as a hardwood would. Look up the BTU/lb value for the wood, and then you have basis for making a cost comparison between your wood and your coal. I don’t know of any wood tho that exceeds 10K BTU/lb for heating. Most don’t exceed 8,000 BTU. See where I’m getting at this “know your coal thing?” If you can get a cord of wood (which might be about 1,000 lbs, give or take) for $90 and coal costs you $150/ton... the coal is losing its edge unless you have really hot coal.
I recommend going through all of this, because much of the information you see advertised in some places depends on the heat value of anthracite, because so many people in PA still burn it. The heat value of anthracite is hard to beat; quite a bit of it will be at least 13,000 BTU/lb, whereas much of the lower-sulphur coal burned in power plants is doing well to exceed 9,000 BTU/lb. If you have something like PRB coal available to you, it is low in sulphur, pretty high in heat content, and (at least here close by) is available in everything from rice or pea coal for stokers up to fist+ sized chunks for those of us who just toss in chunks into a firebrick-lined wood stove.
No grate? There’s hope if you can use the larger chunks I mentioned above - I just toss ‘em in on top of a wood fire. But if you’re constrained to smaller coal (eg, 1/2 in to 1 in gravel-like coal), well, you’re going to have to make up a grate. If you can weld and cut metal, you can hack one up for yourself. Even if it burns through after one season, if you can get the metal cheap enough and do your own fab (and it doesn’t have to be pretty — who is going to examine it all that closely with a fire on top of it?), you can knock one together for the next season just as cheaply.
Worth considering in anticipation of any upcoming BTU tax on the stuff eh?
I still remember the coal furnace at home, and standing on this one register to warm up after playing outside. Mom’s wood cook stove in the kitchen. The pitcher pump on the drain board, and of course the outhouse. I remember the black soot upon the newly fallen snow. The homemade snow ice creme. No heat upstairs for some reason. The windows would be a sheet of ice, but it was so warm in bed. The school had coal fired furnaces. We would sneak into the boiler room for a couple cigs. Along with some of the teachers. Times were good. So many things to reminesce about. I do love my free gas heat now though. There is one family in town who still burns coal. Love to smell it. Lordy, I am about to get old.
I remember heating the cabins at Camp Manitoc (BSA) with coal. The stoves were coal fired, too.
Man would that anthracite coal heat up a cabin.
L
It sure is, you can see all the way to the bottom of a deep lake.
With Dear Leader coming to power next month, does anyone here have any recipes for grass, tree bark, dandelions and road kill? Or how to convert your car to a wood-burning engine like they do in Cuba? Which insects and rodents are tasty?
We came very close to buying a coal stove this year. We did go with a pellet stove and use a oil furnace as an adjunct when it gets around 0.
We are still considering a coal furnace but we are waiting to see what O is going to do with coal.
Takes up to 4’ lengths of wood, which we already have 5 life times supply of; or coal, which is locally available. Might even be a 'bootleg' supply locally, if it came to that.
Some time, I might just install it in the basement; or add a room for it. Ducting through 18” of concrete wall and log walls would be a bit of a challenge, though.
It is probably going to be worth more every year. The reason we didn’t buy coal in September is that all of the units were on back order until Jan.
Yes. You need a special grate to do it efficiently.
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