Coal heat

[Maurice Zweber]

A hundred years ago (seems like it) when I went through basic training at Ft. Knox, KY and later training at Ft Leonard, MO we heated all the buildings with coal. I now farm in Kentucky, (a large coal producing state) but never hear of anyone heating with coal, at least in my area.
What are the pros and cons of heating a farm shop with an inexpensive coal heater?

 

[John T]

Not all that many years ago when I bought a farm we heated with a stoker coal furnace (maybe it was an Iron Fireman) theres more labor as you have to get the coal,,,,,,,,,shovel it into the stove or stoker as the case may be,,,,,,,shovel out the clinkers,,,,,BUTTTTTTTTTTTT it sure was warm and toasty ANDDDDDDDD the cost was very reasonable.

Are you talking lump coal in a big stove or furnace or stoker coal??? Regardless theres some labor involved but hey thats good for ya right

We could get the local (Southern Indiana) high sulfur soft dirty coal for something like $20 per ton then while the hard black shiny low sulfur eastern Kentucky coal was more like $90 BUTTTTTTTTT I almost think the good coal was more economical,,,,,,,,,more heat,,,,,,,,less coal burned,,,,,,,,like NO CLINKER,,,,,,,it was so hard n shiny your hands wouldnt hardly get dirty if you picked it up.

Go for it I say........

John T

 

[k9mills]

Maurice--
Great idea since home heating and farm use are the only two exemptions I am aware of granted by EPA for burning coal without the additions of scrubbers for coal ash and sulfur compound removal. The problems - - the coal burning by-products will rust out your shiny metal shop roof in no time and no one in this part of the state has small quantities or large quantities for that matter of coal for sale and most folks want the convenience of automated set the thermostat heating systems. Not too many folks these days remember carrying and shoveling 100-400 pounds of coal into the stove twice a day along with managing the draft to keep the firing uniform. For the best results coal burning equipment requires a fairly tall masonry chimney to insure a good draft for proper burning. During Inf Basic at Fort Jackson 50 years ago, I thought it great to be appointed fireman for our barracks until I found out it meant getting up an hour earlier than anyone else and shoveling several hundred pounds of coal into the boiler. Glad it lasted only 8 weeks. Good luck with your project......
KM

 

[Anonymous-0]

Use only clean burning Pocahontas Coal.

 

[Wardner]

All anthracite coal is clean burning. It comes from northeast PA with Scranton being the northern limit and Reading being the eastern limit. Price at the breakers (dealers) is now about $175-$195 per ton. I have mined about 20 tons from coal bins in the cellars of local houses here in MA.

 

[Sean Feeney]

I know the DOT Troopers here at the Bourne Bridge see that load coming. you better have some answers.

 

[keh]

I was at Fort Jackson fall of 1962 and remember the coal furnaces. The first barracks I was in for basic, however, was heated with gas.On cold still mornings there was a cloud of coal smoke over the area.

KEH

 

[Stephen in SoKY]

You just need a Warm Morning or other such hand fired stove and a load of Bituminous lump. Here's a ton I picked up in Owensboro earlier this year for $75. Anthracite must be shipped in to Kentucky and consequently runs around $330/ton. Won't find any lump Anthracite either, it will likely all be bagged/palletized.

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[RodinNS]

Now that's how you load coal...
They used to do that here as well when they hauled from the pit to the wash plant. My buddy's old man used to own several trucks and my friend gre up fixing them...
He got called one night for a trailer, stuck on the ramp heading up the coal pile. 20 odd foot dump trailer with 6' sides, crowned up like that picture with coal falling off. The trailer broke a Chalmers walking beam. They estimated the load at 50 tonne net on a tandem trailer....

Rod

 

[Cas]

I used to shovel hard (anthracite) coal into
the boiler when I was a kid. We bought it at
the local coal yard for $24.00 a ton. Am I that
old?

 

[TomH in PA]

There are still a lot of homes here in central PA heated by coal. Make sure you know what you're doing, plenty of people have been burned by opening the door too fast and having it flash back at them. A woman I worked with got a nasty burn on her hand that way.

 

[rustyj14]

When i was a young lad, we lived in town, and we burned coal in our furnace. My Dad would call the coal company--I think the name was Tejan coal co.-and they'd haul in a dump truck load, and dump it near the coal door that opened into the inside coal room. And, if money was really tight--guess who got to shovel the coal into the coal room----.
One morning, Dad went down to stoke up the furnace, and several minutes later we heard a gosh awful BOOM emanating from the cellar! We ran down to see Daddy staggering around, with his face as black as coal dust and he was coughing a lot! Of course, us kids saw only the funny black clown staggering around the cellar and we got to laughing at the sight!
Well, when he got washed up and got his breath back, he came up from the cellar mad as heXX, and only mother saved us from a nasty beating!

 

[440roadrunner]

When "I was a kid" (graduated HS '66) we heated with wood until I was in Jr High, then my Dad installed a coal stoker. I don't know where coal came from in N Idaho, so far's I know there are no coal mines around here. Soon after I joined the Navy in '68, my Dad went to oil.---Coal in our area had not only doubled in price in just a few years, but the quality went straight down.

I haven't seen a coal delivery truck in this area in a LONG time. I would assume it's virtually unavailable.

 

[El Toro]

I was there for a week in 1953 and you didn't need any coal. It was hot. Hal

 

[Stan in Oly, WA]

Hi Maurice,

About 25 years ago my wife and I lived in a house that was small enough that we were able to heat it with a "parlor stove" in the living room. The stove we bought was a Belgian made Efel which was designed to burn either wood or coal. We decided to try coal. We bought some anthracite which seemed to be of good quality---very hard and shiny. (In an earlier response to your posting here someone said good anthracite will not leave clinker. If that's true, then the coal we tried was not as good as it might have been. It produced a fair amount of clinker.) I'm sure it was more of a problem for us in a living room than it would be for you in a shop.

The trouble with clinker, in my experience, is that it eventually fills the stove with a hard glowing mass which is not throwing out enough heat for you to just wait for it to burn out. You've got to get rid of it so that you can reload the stove with coal. Our Efel stove had a mechanism for shaking the clinker into a removable tray below the grate, but I never found a way to time it so that I didn't have to carry out some amount of still burning material through the living room. We finally used up the relatively small amount of coal we had bought by burning it until the stove would be full of clinker, then using the baseboard heaters for a day or two until everything in the stove was cold and we could clean it and repeat.

That might not be a problem in your case, but it's something you might want to be aware of.

All the best, Stan

 

[barn E]

We had coal heat in the 50's in Detroit. It was the biggest hardest stuff you ever saw. Usually only 1 or 2 lumps on the shovel. Seems like 20 bucks a ton. Never knew what a clinker was. This stuff burned completely. Rich people had stokers. We had the shovel. Guess there was a little ash cause we put it on the sidewalks. Octopus had a pipe loop through the burner to heat water and a tank for humidification. Also had gas side arm coil and burner for water on exposed steel tank. You could go feel the tank and see how far up(or was it down)it would be hot. If you left it on too long, water would be steaming and rusty.(No safety valve.) Memories were good in those days. Dave p.s. All our kitty cats were black from digging in the coal bin(mice?)

 

[MeanGene1]

My gramps got into the coal business, mainly to give his guys on the farm/trucking/lime spreading end something productive to do in the winter (south central NY state)- the IH dealership guys were usually pretty busy, as they also had a contract to maintain the school district's buses. All the farm dump trucks had hatches in the floor and hangers underneath for the coal chutes, and we always had several loaders around as we brought them in from the satelite lime stockpiles in the winter- the Ford 8N and '53 Chebbie 1-1/2 ton started the best after both got 8V batteries, so that was the usual fare. Shovel it in the hole in the truck floor with a grain shovel, down the chute into the customer's basement coal bin through a swinging window- pretty simple. Usually about a dozen deliveries a week, and we had a couple 10 whl dumps so the guys could also haul in the coal to the bins out in the yard. "Lump" coal was about 3-5" in size, and "nut" coal was around 2-1/2".
We had a coal stove in the house basement, and an old upright coal stove in the shop, which was in an old dairy barn. So one day, one of the guys, not the one who invented gunpowder, the other guy... is cleaning up in the shop, and decides he's going to clean the outside of the coal stove- with a bucket of gas and a brush. At least one of the other guys was there working on one of the deuce-and-a-half spreaders, and put him and the rest of the fire out- he healed up pretty good by spring, in time to collect his Darwin Award...
Nice old guy, but never a good piece of luck- a few years later, he went to work as a welder for an outfit that built potato and onion harvesters. Went to the can one mid-morning, and didn't come back- co-workers went looking, and found him stone dead of a heart attack, seated on the throne...

 

[Anonymous-0]

When dad was down in the basement we learned not to go down there or near him for at least an hour. He would be down there cursing and beating on the feed auger till it would work again.

 

[John S-B]

I was at Ft. Jackson in '80 and they were oil fired then, also for the water heaters. I was probably of the last to be in the old WWII barracks on tank hill.
As a kid I lived in a house with a coal furnace. We could only afford the high sulfur coal, and it left a nasty soot on everything. Had to was the walls monthly in winter. I'd never want have a coal furnace, too much of a pain to deal with.

 

[PJH]

Gene, you've been around some interesting people. I especially like the "invented gunpowder" comment.

When I was in high school, one of the kids would drive his dad's 2 ton Chevy to school. After school, we'd take it up to the old Streamline mine at Percy IL for a load of coal. His dad warned him not to leave the spare tire/wheel in the bed (under the coal) for obvious reasons, so we'd roll it out before we drove under the tipple. The guy would pull the chain to drop the coal in the truck, and he would gleefully wait while Willy, who was the strongest guy I ever met, would pitch the spare up on top of the load of coal, like it was only a basketball. I'll never forget that guy grinning from ear to ear as he watched Willy straightarm that spare.

I wanta think we got $10 per ton, delivered, for lump coal, but I am probably wrong. Sounds too cheap.

Paul

 

[Ken Macfarlane]

I just watched a christmas movie that had a scene like that. I think its called a Christmas Story.