I don't want to get run out of the club but here goes - Coal

[KeithO]

I occasionally buy a half ton load of soft coal to burn in my wood stove on cold nights of when I anticipate I will need an extended burn (overtime). Soft coal actually burns pretty good in modern EPA stoves with the secondary air system. This stuff should never see the inside of a catalytic stove or the catalyst will soon be toast. The products of the sulfur may be objectionable to someone downwind, but the only time I am able to notice at my place is right after I dump a bunch of coal onto a bed of glowing coals prior to them igniting.

There are some places (western states) where soft coal is far more abundant than wood, in particular hardwoods. To ignore this product doesn't seem right, considering that the vast majority of our electricity is made by burning the exact same stuff, and that is after having (the coal) freighted more than half way across the USA, and then having the electricity transferred down how many miles of high voltage lines to get to you. In the past, nobody considered the overall efficiency of this process, and in some cases entire subdivisions were developed around exclusively electrical power for everything including heat.

If wood is readily available or you can afford to buy it, then burn it. But soft coal can be burnt effectively, even though just about nobody makes a stove specifically designed to burn it. Anthracite has become expensive (over $385/Ton in Michigan) if you are too far away from the mines, particularly when considering the cost of diesel (and my opinion is that our truckers are being ***** by the oil companies and the government). So realistically, unless someone starts running trainloads of coal from PA Westwards and Eastwards and gets the entire supply chain back on the map, anthracite is not going to become more commonly available for the rest of us at something approaching competitive prices.

 

[NEW HOPE ENGINEER]

I occasionally buy a half ton load of soft coal to burn in my wood stove on cold nights of when I anticipate I will need an extended burn (overtime). Soft coal actually burns pretty good in modern EPA stoves with the secondary air system. This stuff should never see the inside of a catalytic stove or the catalyst will soon be toast. The products of the sulfur may be objectionable to someone downwind, but the only time I am able to notice at my place is right after I dump a bunch of coal onto a bed of glowing coals prior to them igniting.

There are some places (western states) where soft coal is far more abundant than wood, in particular hardwoods. To ignore this product doesn't seem right, considering that the vast majority of our electricity is made by burning the exact same stuff, and that is after having (the coal) freighted more than half way across the USA, and then having the electricity transferred down how many miles of high voltage lines to get to you. In the past, nobody considered the overall efficiency of this process, and in some cases entire subdivisions were developed around exclusively electrical power for everything including heat.

If wood is readily available or you can afford to buy it, then burn it. But soft coal can be burnt effectively, even though just about nobody makes a stove specifically designed to burn it. Anthracite has become expensive (over $385/Ton in Michigan) if you are too far away from the mines, particularly when considering the cost of diesel (and my opinion is that our truckers are being ***** by the oil companies and the government). So realistically, unless someone starts running trainloads of coal from PA Westwards and Eastwards and gets the entire supply chain back on the map, anthracite is not going to become more commonly available for the rest of us at something approaching competitive prices.

If i put soft coal in the smokedragon i think my neighbors would hang me!I have burned it before and the cloud of yellow smoke just hung around the back yard.LOL If you can burn it great enjoy it,i personally love the smell of coal smoke hence my part time job. ;-P
Mark

 

[Peter B.]

Say Mark - New Hope Engineer:

I'm wondering when you add hard coal to your wood fire?

Last year (a bad one here in Wisconsin), I bought a bag of Anthracite and gave it a try, but I didn't have a lot of luck, whether burning coal alone or adding a few lumps to a wood fire (even with a good bed of coals, even with underfire air only).

Any special tips? I've still got half the bag...

Thanks.

Peter B.

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[stone18]

About 9 years ago, when I was living in Central Pennsylvania, our split-entry home had electric baseboard heat (woa, was that expensive in January!!) so I bought a used self-feeding coal stove that burned rice coal (small pieces about the size of of wood pellets). A loaded hopper would burn nearly two days before I had to reload and empty the ash bucket. I don't remember the name of the unit, but it was nice and heated the entire downstairs (two large rooms and a bath) and probably half the upstairs.

It was difficult to get going, due to the high heat required to get the coal burning, but it wasn't much work to keep going. A blower fed air under the coal on a drilled-out metal plate and a sliding plate fed the coal from the hopper...very adjustable actually. A local company delivered the coal and loaded it into a large wooded bin on the side of the driveway. I kind of miss the thing because it wasn't much work at all, probably about 5 minutes a day tops.

 

[anilawr]

We burned a Franco Belge coal stove for over 20 years and heated a 1600 square foot rancher with less than two tons a year. The stove had a cast iron body with a steel jacket and moved an amazing amount of air by conduction. The stove was in the corner of the L of an L-shaped rancher and the temperature close to the stove was only about 7 degrees warmer than at the farthest point of the house. Cost per ton then was about $120 and the house was always toasty warm…sometimes a little too toasty. We burned pea coal, anthracite. Coal bin was in the garage and we loaded the stove once a day with one bucket of coal, shook it down twice a day, but in cold and windy weather we burned a little more than a bucket and shook it down three or four times. Loved the cozy, economical heat, hated the dirt. No matter how carefully you loaded the stove, there was always airborne coal dust. Shaking produced dust, too, and dusting and vacuuming a couple of times a week was necessary. There was also black crud all over the garage.

Coal is difficult to start because of its high ignition point, but we found the easiest way was to take hot coals from our wood stove and put them in the coal stove and add small quantities of coal. Using a bed of Matchlite charcoal in the coal stove and then adding coal worked, too. (I could tell you stories about the frustration of using a propane torch before we got smart.) If your chimney doesn’t draw a good draft, you will have difficulty maintaining a coal fire…we had to add about three feet to our chimney in order to draw sufficient draft.

Until it got cold enough, we burned wood in the wood stove at the other end of the house. Most of the time, it was mid-December before it was cold enough to fire up the coal stove and we usually let it go out by the end of March. There can be weather extremes in SE PA…when you have a cold spell and the thermal mass of the stove is hot, it doesn’t cool down quickly. If you have a warm period, it’s a royal pain to let it go out and restart it, so you open the windows and wait for colder weather. We have some acreage and we would just dump the ash in the woods or scatter it on the ice in the driveway, but disposal could be a problem.

My husband developed back problems a few years ago and we replaced the coal stove with a propane stove, now our primary heat source (definitely not as economical as coal), because he couldn’t load and carry a bucket of coal. But we use the wood burner at the other end of the house intermittently. We have our own wood supply, most of which I handle after we get a couple of guys in to drop the dead trees and cut them into rounds small enough for me to handle and split. It was a sad day when they hauled the old coal cooker up the driveway. Love burning wood, but miss the coal. Don’t miss the dirt at all.

 

[NEW HOPE ENGINEER]

Say Mark - New Hope Engineer:

I'm wondering when you add hard coal to your wood fire?

Last year (a bad one here in Wisconsin), I bought a bag of Anthracite and gave it a try, but I didn't have a lot of luck, whether burning coal alone or adding a few lumps to a wood fire (even with a good bed of coals, even with underfire air only).

Any special tips? I've still got half the bag...

Thanks.

Peter B.

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I simply get a good bed of hot wood coals in the stove, and slowly feed the coal on a little at a time.
Mark