Coal for Shop Heat

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BigWhip

BigWhip

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The last couple of years I haven't been able to cut, bust and stack firewood for my shop. After a long hunt I found a company that sold coal in 50 lbs bags to bolster my shrinking stack of firewood. $10.00 a bag.
Today I burned some for the first time. WOW. Does any other people burn coal and can give me some tips? I use a Papa Bear wood and coal heating stove.
 
Biggest thing I used to HATE about coal is the smell, and you have to clean out the "clinkers" quite often.

(When I was in Jr. hi school, we went from individual wood heaters in the house to a coal stoker. From about 63 until 68, when I joined the Navy, the coal in the inland NW got worse and worse quality (harder?) and produced more and more clinkers as well as more and more of them WHILE AT THE SAME TIME getting more and more expensive.)

But if you can get it cheap, easy, why not??
 
Both pairs of my grandparents in Pittsburgh used coal for CHS in their homes into the 1950s and 1960s. I remember my grandfather banking the coal before everybody went to bed at night and then, every morning before everybody got up, he would go to the cellar, unbank the embers, and add fresh coal to supply steam heat for the day.

I grew up on Long Island and we had a big mental hospital nearby. The boilers and generators ran on coal. The EPA forced them to change from bituminus to anthracite coal; the latter burned cleaner and supplied mroe BTUs. My best friend converted his fireplace to a coal/wood-burning stove. He would regularly take a drive to the nut house and fill a couple of 5 gallon buckets with anthracite.
 
When I was but a lad we lived in an old farmhouse which had no insulation, an old oil furnace that didn't work worth a damn, and an old Ben Franklin stove in the center room of the house. We would all huddle in that center room and burn wood in the BF. The house never got over 55 degrees all winter. One year my Dad decided to buy a ton of coal to get a little hotter heat and stretch the wood. We had to sledgehammer the chunks of coal into small pieces after we learned why not to burn a lot of coal at once. That stove would turn cherry red and the coal would explode, sounding like bullets in the stove and rattle the round burner inserts on the top. We would break it into small chunks and throw them in while the wood was burning. My mom hated the smell, she said it always smelled like a train yard in there, and everything in the house was covered in coal dust. Probably not the best to breathe either. If I were you, I would break it up pretty small to control the burn, it was scary as a kid to see that stove so red and I'll bet a lot of old farmhouses burned down that way!!! Good luck, Geof
 
When I was a kid up here in Winnipeg, Canada my folks heated the house with a coal burning furnace. The coal was carried from the delivery truck in burlap sacks. They would pour the briquettes, like Kingsford BBQ briquettes but about 2 1/2 inches square, down a chute to the basement coal bin. Dad would order 3 tons for the winter. It cost $5 a ton. That was the late '50's and early '60's. Good heat but wasteful as the coal was still burning when the furnace fan shut off.
 
My grandpa told me about burning tire chunks in the wood stove during the depression. LOL…… He says tires put out some heat.
 
I have an old house furnace that burns coal via a stoker. Paid 25 bucks for the thing and put it in my shop. Used to buy 5 tons a year for it and it was nice to use, but you did have to empty the ash every couple days. Then the price of trucking went through the roof, the mine only wanted to sell to the public one day a week, and they hit a seam that was pretty crappy quality. I took out the burner and I'm converting it to burn used oil.
 
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