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?
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.