Gonna Buyt Some Coal

Ok I went back and glanced through most of the posts. Most advice is right on. We are lucky that we get to haul our own and pick it up ourselves. We use 5 gal buckets to get it and some times good corn sacks. When doing it this way we have nearly no dust from the coal in the house and no mess outside. We get a mixture of sizes and use smaller pieces during the day so that it all burns and doesn't leave clinkers. At night I like to put in 2 pieces about 3x6x4 inches and they will leave a nice bed of coals for morning. Just throw in some small pieces, Egg size, or wood kindling if you have any to get a good flame going. At night we also have a propane heater so we don't have to get up and tend the wood or coal. One thing to remember is that the hotter you can burn coal the cleaner it burns. A blue gray smoke is what I like to see. If the temps are above 25 or so we try to burn wood as the coal really heats when burned right. Now to get it going from scratch is a trick and takes a lot of kindling. We get wood strips from the sawmill for kindling and slabs to burn when the have them. Put a few strips in on paper and get them going and add more to get a good hot blaze then star adding coal or add enough that it doesn't knock down your fire. I use the egg size for this and in no time you can have a roaring fire going. When it burns down a little then add larger pieces. The only name I can find on our old heater is cast in the door and it is KING-O-HEAT. Hope this helps. Sam
PS We are luck the coal mine is about 30 miles from our house and the sawmill about 20 miles away.

Chesnut coal is around $230 a ton around here. Some of you guys are getting a deal on your prices. Will be going on Monday to get coal from the coal yards in the pickup truck..1/2 ton and will get about 300#'s or so at a cost of around $40. yes..we have grates in both of the upstairs stoves..ones a Coalmaster stove and the other an old 1920's Kalamazoo livingroom stove. My gosh..when it gets heating..it's hot !! Yes..we do leave a few windows cracked for safety reasons and this old farm house isn't that air tight either. It does take a "nack" to keep it going..banking it at night and all but with the prices of wood going sky high will be burning coat during the colder days here in the mountians of Pa. Thanks for all your help !!

Those small pieces from the RR tracks suer did help out a lot. If I wanted some coal & there were some remote tracks around,, I would look there. I see long trains with many coal cars heading down a set of tracks, not far away from me. You would think it would be a great place to walk the tracks,,, BUT it leads to a NUCLEAR power plants.

Simpler Times, I break down the large lumps to sizes from baseball to football. Often people start out breaking with a sledge hammer, which works, but, a pole axe is a much better tool. Turning the lumps on their side:



reveals layers that can easily be cleaved with an axe. Put the then slimmer lumps of a flat surface, turn the pole axe over, and BAM! you've got usable lumps. There will be no uniformity to the size or shape. To get that you must buy sized coal, which is what the egg that I buy is. Egg is screened over 1 inch holes but through 4 inch. Like Tamsam I run egg during the day, but at night I load much more lump to hold a productive fire for up to 10 hours. The bigger the lumps the longer it holds. There's also stoker coal which is screened through 1/2" holes, but it takes a special stove to burn it. I lust after a small Combustioneer or Wil-Burt stoker stove. They're no longer made.

Please remember that I'm only discussing Bituminous or soft coal. Here, the price of Anthracite is so close to propane that it's impractical for me to use.

Coal needs underfire air to burn properly, hence the discussion of grates. In my experience, any significant accumulation of ash under a coal bed smothers the fire in short order. That's why coal stoves have shaker grates specifically to remove the ash from under the fire without disturbing the burning coal above. For burning bit coal an overfire air supply is desird as well. It would be opened somewhat for the first 15-20 minutes after reloading to burn off the volatiles from the fresh load of coal and avoid puffbacks. After that they're generally closed so all combustion air is supplied from beneath the grates. Once these volatiles have burned off, anyone passing by my house wouldn't know I'm burning anything, much less coal. The effluent is far clearer than with even very well seasoned wood.

As a child we had 2 coal stoves and one coal grate in our house, 1 in the stripping room, 1 in the milk room and 1 each in two tenant houses. While we switched main house to propane while I was fairly young, I worked with coal heat for many years in the milk room & stripping room. I abandoned coal and burned well seasoned hardwood exclusively until a few years ago when getting up wood became a physical challenge for me. I reviewed all the alternatives and coal won by a large margin pricewise and in the effort required to heat my home. Unless one is using a stoker, coal stoves operate just like wood stoves in that they need no electricity to run. It's not for everyone, but it's certainly worth considering.