Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Burning coal

atv- most of these guys are talking about 'real' coal! That coal from Healy is only about a month older than downed wood!

I burned wood and coal when I lived in Fbx. The coal had a lot of conveniences and held a fire longer, IMO. I bought a Riteway wood/coal burner with an ash drawer and shaker grate. It's thermostatic and firebrick-lined.

I pay $9.50 per bag here.

I remember the same and my father dumping the buckets from the back of our Hudson onto a homemade screen.

I burn anthercite or hard coal in the shop. I go right to the breaker and pickup 4 to 5 ton at a time.

Something like that, I don't recall exact amount now.

Mostly wood but when we cold get coal cheap it went in as well. kwg

We have a Hitzer wood and coal burner on the main floor. Use coal about 30% of the time. It runs about $60/ton for lump coal here, or it did last winter. Haven't bought any yet this year.

Good clean, long burning fires for us. The only complaint we have is that the coal fires sometimes overheat the place. That's why we only burn it part of the time.

My grand dad'shouse was in Foyil Ok, right in the middle of the Oklahoma strip mining. He had a big black pot belled coal burner in the living room. I remember the big pile of coal out back and the galvanized bucket and scoop shovel he used to bring it in the house.




Oklahoma Coal Production


Commercial coal mining began in Oklahoma in 1873 with the removal of bituminous coal from underground mines in eastern Oklahoma. Surface mining began in 1915. Like the oil and gas industries, the coal industry has experienced production cycles. Since 1969, the Oklahoma coal industry has had as few as eight active mines and as many as sixty. Oklahoma coal production has declined from its peak of 5.73 million tons in 1981, to a low of 979 thousand tons in 2010. The Oklahoma Department of Mines recorded approximately 1.4 million tons of bituminous coal produced from 9 mines in seven counties for the year 2010. Until recent years, the major consumption of Oklahoma coal had been by out-of-state utilities. Major in-state use of Oklahoma coal has been by the cement and lime industry, and utilities.

There is potential for Oklahoma's coal resources to provide a basis for economic growth; only the apex of coal resources has been exploited. Large bituminous and metallurgical deposits remain to be produced, but will require large capital investments by sophisticated mining companies. Production and market issues affect whether or not some coal reserves are economical to mine. Regulations concerning mining and reclamation requirements also play a role in limiting coal production. Future production will hinge on development of additional markets for high sulfur coal and the increased use and development of clean coal technology at coal fired utilities, both within the state and in the surrounding area.

The times Saddlesore is talking about are what is known as "the good old days."

Yea, I have lots of memories from those days also. No way could a house be kept clean on the inside while burning coal. And the odor is something you don't soon forget. Ties right in with the kerosene (coal oil) lamps of that time.

Grandparents farm house was heated by a huge coal furnace located in the basements and it looked like an octopus with the heat pipes radiating out from it.

The furnace draft control was located in the parlor and one day as a young lad I decided to play with it. Grandma heard the pipes creaking and found the control setting for a wide open draft. Got a spanking out of that.

When they tore the old farmhouse down I rescued the draft control. Brings back a lot of memories.

I have enjoyed reading this thread. I can remember folks (wanna be high brow types) disparagingly talking about one fellow of modest means "still burning coal", even then at a young age I realized they were shiiitttheels talking like that. The fellow was a veteran and was a kind person that most never bothered to get to know. I consider my self fortunate to have spent tim with him.

Funny, that he eventually switched to an oil burner as it was more cost effective for him at the time, they switched litanies from coal to oil as Nat gas was in the 'hood (I love saying that it makes me feel gangsta, even tho I am an extremely white bread lass) at the time and the "elitist" (wish they were so lucky to be middle class) loved to grind on that fellow that lived alone (his wife died). [bleep], some of the neighbors were and In their scorn I'd be happy to burn coal to their horror.

Thanks for the thread...

Be safe
Patty

For those that burn coal, how do you start your coal fire?

Usually with kindling wood, we used corncobs also. Then add coal to top, smaller pieces at first then bigger.

Here is my father in a coal mine in 1940, before I was born in 43. He is 2nd from left, on the bottom row. He was 26 at the time. He passed away at age 96.



When I was in7th grade, I attended a one room class room that was set aside from the elementary school. This was while waiting for a new junior high to get finished. Since a neighbor and I lived close to the school within walking distance, our job was to get there about an hour ahead of class time and start the pot belly stove burning coal. It was a fairly good size that heated the big class room of about 35 students. Of course those close to the stove were always warm and the ones in back not so much. The city kids got to sit close, us from the country in back because if our clothes got real warm ,they usually smelled quite a bit like cow. After hunkering down against a cow's flank milking, you never got the smell off. Of course we were use to it and never could understand what they complained about.

Start with a wood fire and when that gets hot slowly start adding coal. Once a coal fire is going I could toss a scuttle of coal on top.

My mom had a gas torch connected to the gas grid. We used the gas grid for cooking and hot water and this torch was used to start the coal burn in the stove in the kitchen and from there you would carry hot coal into other stoves in kid's room and living room.

But I grew up down town Prague and on the wrong side of the wall - life was different than.

Also the typical coal was coal dust glued and pressed into brikett. Looked like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Rekord_Brikett.jpg

Interesting.

Saddlesore- Thanks for the story. This story SCREAMS southwestern PA. Is this, in fact where these things happened?

I grew up in a area where coal was once king. I remember camping out in the middle of the winter in old coke ovens smoking stolen cigerettes from someones dad. There were still a ton of old houses that had coal furnaces.

The smell of a coal fire is something very distinguishable. Just 2 nights ago i left work with a couple guys and could smell coal burning. Its been VERY cold here and i guess the local's have decided to fire up the coal stoves. After the past 5 years in New Mexico i INSTANTLY knew what that sulferish smell was on the walk to my buddys car.

My parents used it as a supplement heat source. Heats good but it creates a little dust.

Wow - just when I thought I could shake the memories, here comes this thread.

I've no doubt our home was the last in the county, by decades, to be heated with coal. It's not like there were all that many to begin with in the plains of Northcentral Indiana. Great Grandpa was rumored to be terrified of fire, having lost 2 granaries and a barn over the years. So he built the garage about 75 yards away from the house, stuck a behemoth of a coal furnace in its basement, & had pipes run under the driveway and sidewalk to the house, where 5 electric pumps sent the water to the radiators in the various parts of the house.

Since I was the most reliable worker of the 3 boys in the family, despite being the youngest, I was "selected" around 7th grade to tend the furnace. I got to fill at 1+ cubic yard hopper before school and before bed, which fed the furnace through an auger. Usually, this took me 10 to 15 minutes to complete a nice heap on top of the hopper. I remember a few spells of -20 degree weather though, where the hopper would be empty when I'd arrive for my duties. These days would take every bit of 45 minutes to reconstitute the hopper, one shovel full at a time.

Of course, when the shear pins would break on the auger drive (all too damned frequently ), I got to unshovel that hopper, so the repairs could be made. After topping off the hopper, I'd remove the clinkers into metal buckets, and restoke the fire by bringing all the dust & debris back into a tidy pile over the fire box. On my way back upstairs, I'd carry the metal buckets & dump the cinders out on the gravel driveway.

I soon learned that if I felt cold in the night, I'd better go check the fuses for the circulating pumps, then head out to the garage to see what was up out there. Either I'd forgotten to shovel the hopper full, or the auger pin broke (again ).

About quarterly, I'd have to clean the ash out of the furnace's baffles. An awful job, that. It didn't take too terribly long, but I'd come back looking like a minstrel, with several times more black dust in my snot than usual.

Before the cold weather hit, and at least once during the winter, we'd have to restock the coal room. This was a concrete walled portion of the garage basement, with a door-sized opening facing the furnace. After stacking 2 bricks on the inside edge of the opening, we'd stack a series of boards across the opening as the room was filled with coal. Filling was accomplished via a manhole in the first floor of the garage, directly above the room. We'd use a bucket tractor to fill the single axle silage truck 'til the tire would squat, then dump it on the first floor of the garage. With the dexterity of a surgeon, my Dad could get the truck into the car-sized garage door, and then raise the dump bed until it almost touched the ceiling. My brothers, sisters, and I would then use all manner of ill-suited tools and implements to get the coal out of the truck, and shoved down the hole into the coal room. More minstrel work, to be sure: Al Jolson had nothin' on me!

For the honor of this work, I recall that I started out at $10/week, though I did eventually get up to $15/week by the time I left for college. Is it any wonder I became a Boilermaker?. I believe they lasted 2 years or so after my departure, before they made the switch to propane. Dad said the cost to heat the house quadrupled.

OK - memories purged, rant over. I think I'll go make an appointment with the therapist. And I'll say some more prayers of gratitude for my swank gas furnace.

FC

jmgraham1986 I was born and raised in SW PA. Actually born in a little burg called New Eagle, which was right next to the town of Monongahela about 30 mile south of Pittsburgh. Funny. times were hard when I was born and I was born at home, 1 block from the hospital.

Ironic that we were forbid to get a job in the mines, but when I left home and moved to NM,I got a job with Sandia Labs for ten years,then a little company in Colorado Springs called Kaman Sciences for 30 years almost. I spent from 1969 thru 1992 working about 3 months out of every year underground doing nuke test. Should have heeded my father's warning as my lungs didn't fare well with that. FC said we brought up old memories. Sure wish I could flush a bunch from what I did.