Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Burning coal

Anyone either burn, or remember using coal for heat?
The used to advertise Green Mark coal on the radio.

Nope , just wood. Coal costs cash money around here , wood only costs labor.

I do remember the coal fired boiler at the school house though.


Mike

Yes, we burned it growing up.
We'd go to the mine where dad worked, and load up a pickup load. We'd burn wood during the day, and use the coal for our night fires.

Yep, Anthracite. I still love the smell of a hard-coal fire.

I burned hard coal in a small wood burning stove that I bought new with a coal burning kit.

The coal stove was a hobby that was hard work and dirty. It smells some also. It did keep my basement warmer and dryer.

One of the worst tasks is that you have to shake down the ashes about twice a day. If this is not done right the stove may go out or burn up the grates. You start the stove with wood.

I remember my grandparents house having a coal furnace. Wheelbarrowing it into the basement and granddad going down before bedtime to load it up for the night.

We used to have a wood stove that had the grates for burning lump coal. We just had to remove the catalytic core to do it as coal will ruin them. We'd burn a couple chunks at night to hold the fire overnight better.

I grew up in South East Ky...Just about everyone heated with coal, I have hand loaded and unloaded more than a few loads of coal. I can still remember going to my Grand parents house!!! there beds were in the living room by the fireplace, Grandmother would lie in bed and spit her backer juice across the room to the fireplace. Those were Good times.

When we lived in the city all of the 'three family houses' had their own coal burning furnace in the basement. Each of the apartments got the heat from ducts. Each tenant had to maintain their own furnace or someone had to do it for you.

Coal was delivered by a dealer thru basement window with a chute.

The city picked up the ashes in barrels by the side of the street.

When we moved into a new house in the 40's it came with an oil fired hot water furnace.

Yes as a kid I can remember having to shovel coal from the back of the bin to the front as the pile went down and all the other work that went with coal.

It seemed like liberation day when we had an oil fired furnace installed.

Then things improved further and we got rid of the 200 gallon oil tank and went to gas and we got even more of our basement back for other uses.

Jim

Shore do. When I was a kid we had a coal heater in the back and one in the front. When it got really cold we'd close off the front part of the house because it costed too much to heat. I well remember pulling clinkers out with a poker hook when they got too big. Remember well also how a strong wind gust would sometimes puff down the chimney and fill the house up with coal smoke. Fall was usually announced by the dump truck bringing a load of coal out to us and dumping it 50 feet or so from the back door. Brought in many a load of coal in coal scuttles and hauled many a load of ash back out.

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Here is a coal bin mess in a basement.

You want to do this only if your getting the coal free and have never done it before.

When i was real young we would go and walk the railroad tracks and pick-up lumps that fell off of the coal car.

Try to let kids do that today,one would be put under the jail.

Lots of fun times when i was growing up.Miss some of them.

took the boy scout troop to a local blacksmith shop. They heated all their kiln (or whatever they are called) with coal.

I asked the guys there where they get it and they told me you can still get it delivered and that they also heat their shop with it.

I would have thought there were laws against it given the EPA and such but I guess not.

I cut and split wood on my property for two wood stoves and a fireplace. There will come a day when either due to health or age, I will no longer be able to, so I have been experimenting with coal in my two wood stoves. The stove at the cabin has a dual grate. It burns coal OK, but I feel long time use would damage the stove. Now I just sprinkle some coal on top of the wood fire to get longer burn times.

The stove at the house has a wood grate only and I just sprinkle coal on the wood fire, also. As an option this stove came with a cast iron liner and coal grate and I have started a search for one.

The Amish in this area buy Anthracite (green) coal by the truckload from Pennsylvania. That is my source.

I buy it locally by 50# bag for my forge.

I burn coal ...today ...wood to ...but coals cheaper by far and a lot less labor to boot. lump coal 65.oo a ton ..cord of fire wood 250.oo (spruce) soft and 325.oo for (birch) hardwood....wood can be had in old wood cutting areas for 10.oo a cord,if they have any areas open, a long ways to go get it at 3.75 a gallon for truck fuel and u can't cut down the trees ...u only get whats on the ground/dead standing..

As a kid there was a pot bellied coal stove in the kitchen, and a big box shaped coal burner in the living room. Ceiling grates passed the heat upstairs. One always gave the shaker handles a jolt with each casual passing. Coal was typically out in a shed, or dumped down a chute into ones basement.

I wish I could still find a good steel coal shovel for snow removal. The ones I find in stores now are aluminum and not near as durable.

We're wood burners here in eastern Oregon, as the only cost is a few gallons of fuel and time. Lots of time. Cut, load, unload, split, stack, and finally pack it in to burn. Sure wish I had a natural gas well in the back yard.

We heated with coal until the late 50's .Everyone had a coal door and a coal bin that you stored the coal in next to the furnace.
In the late 40's my father and two uncles had a little private coal mine. They would go in and pick ax the coal out and us boys would drag it out in burlap sacks to the vehicle. We did not have any pick up trucks in those days and it went in the trunk.

We had only soft coal and this mine was a 2 ft seam although there were a lot of commercial mines that had 4 ft seams.

In the 50's strip mines came into vogue and many farmers sold the coal rights to companies and got free coal to boot. That coal was lot dirtier and we usually had to bust it up with a sledge hammer.

A little side story. My father came over from Italy when he was 5. At 9, he had his first job in coal mine, picking up coal that fell of the carts pulled by ponies. He made 3 cents a day and my grandfather made 9 cents a day and that is what a family of 6 lived on.
My father worked his way up to driving the pony teams that once they went underground, never came out. He got fired from that when the team got away from him and they ran away, eventually running into the air fan and got killed.

So he got a job in another mine and worked his way up to a shooter. ( dynamite)

After getting trapped three times in cave ins, he vowed to never go back into a mine again and forbid us boys to.

After rough couple of years, he got a job in a spring and axle company and then for US Steel in a rolling mill as an apprentice machinist. He worked his way up to a journeyman machinist, teaching himself the necessary math involved. All this and he only had a 5th grade education.

He related many stories to me right before he passed. One was that when first married they rented small room for $12 a month. The cockroaches were so bad they set the legs of the bed in cans filled with coal oil to keep the cockroaches from crawling in be with them.

Another was they coal company ran a small train to and from the nearest town. My dad lived in a coal company house and the train took them to town on Saturday night and brought them back on Sunday. They worked 6 days a week

man s-s, I have it easy, with my home depot bucket and my outdoor boiler ....