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.

[img]http://ts3.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4643926019279242&pid=15.1[/img]

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 ....

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.

Most older homes around where I live burned coal for heat back in the day. Many still have the cast iron coal chute doors outside on a basement foundation wall. Those homes that didn't have coal burning furnaces had at least one coal burning fireplace grate and a centrally located Warm Morning type coal stove.

My grandmother's house had a coal fireplace grate in the living room and a fairly good size coal burning heating stove located in the middle of her big kitchen as well as her old cast iron wood burning cook stove. My uncles used to make temporary 'make-do' patches to plug small rust holes in the stove pipes with a mixture of red clay, water and salt. To my recollection they never cleaned any of their chimneys and never had a one to catch on fire.

A few pieces of kindling wood (usually rejected hardwood brush handles that an old local brush factory sold by the pickup truck load) and little wadded up newspaper was what they used to start coal fires. Great childhood memories watching that coal fireplace burning and popping and the wind-up mantel clock ticking away in the background while my uncles talked about hunting, fishing and dogs. No better insomnia remedy ever.

The wood burning cook stove was replaced by a LP gas cook stove not long after my grandmother died in the early 80's but the coal fireplace grate and coal heating stove were still in regular use on up until the mid 90's by my lifelong batchlor uncle. After he died the property was sold and the old house and outbuildings were razed.

How did the coal burning fireplace smell?

The picture in my avatar is the coal fire burning in the E.F.M. stoker (i.e. furnace) used to centrally heat my home and domestic hot water.

The anthracite coal is delivered from the mine located about three miles from my house by the ton, and the ash gets picked up by the township every week (twice per week during winter).

I don't think there is a better value for the combination of my money and time.

This is pretty much what I have in the attached link. They are still made and will probably last the lifetime of a house:

EFM Stoker

As much as I can recall it wasn't a bad smell at all to me but coal does have it's own unique smell.

Most of you folks seem to have at least lived through your coal experiences and seem to be OK.

Presently the enviro crowd is fighting tooth and nail to prevent coal export/transportation down the Columbia river corridor via barge or train. Listening to their song, one would think the dust from a single coal train would end life as we know it.

Doesn't help that the big O near swore an oath to do away with coal. Look at the burners in a modern coal plant today with their bright blue flames, and one with think they were burning gas.

High school we had to close the windows when the coal was delivered, I am sure it has been changed in the last 50 years.

Wife's uncle was the preacher in Chugwater, he had a coal furnace when we visited there. After he retired to another house, they had propane.

Closest I came to the things were all the converted gravity furnaces with a big gas fire and lots of asbestos piping. My home had one fance gas stove for the whole house, 2 rows of burners, no thermostat. When I was around 15 dad put in a boiler and hot water heat. Neighbors were Mexican/gringo and had a big coal range in he kitchen when I was a kid. Also a 36 Ford Woody that would haul the whole bunch of us to the matinee, school, and swimming in the summer.

The coal plants here are having to shut down so we can use more expensive to build gas plants, and wind/solar. The coal trains seem to have a coating now as they do not make dust. I have thought of going down when one is stopped and see if I can find any Christmas presents.

Here's a some what related story. The house my parents and I lived in was at the foot of a steep hill. (At least it seemed steep to me when I was little.) In those days it was more or less a neighbourhood street. Today it is an arterial street meaning it carries a high volume of traffic every day.

In the winter we used to sleigh ride down the icy road. A friend of mine lived about four houses from the top of the hill. Due to the number of cars that used to get stuck trying to get up the hill in the winter my friends father started putting his coal ashes out on the road in front of his house. All us kids hated him because he screwed up our sleigh riding fun.

As another side issue, here in Ontario our Liberal government (kind of equivalent to US Democrats) closed two coal fired electric generating plants without having any alternative sources of supply. To my knowledge they never investigated the possibility of installing modern scrubbers, etc. to allow them to continue in operation. They tell us in a few years and after spending a few billion dollars they will have replacement generating facilities constructed. All in the interest of a green future for our children. Too bad if they go broke paying for the alternative.

Jim

I had the twin to that stove for a while. Still regret trading it off even though I no longer had use for it. Great stoves even if you just burn wood in them. They do not have a built in blower but a heat exchanger in the stove pipe works wonders even in a house that has almost no insulation value.

It was a terrific stove! That's not my actual stove, but an identical one from the web.

It kept 1600 sq ft from freezing in all kind of below zero temps. It would get a tad bit cool if I was gone for long. Almost always had to run home after work to 'feed the stove' before heading to evening activities.

With a Magic heat exchanger on mine and good seasoned elm, I was able to turn the thermostat down enough that I could stoke the stove full and it would burn for 24 hours. I would just shake the grates and restock the fire box and go to work. The exchanger really did jump up the efficiency of the stove.

My fuels were spruce and lignite/sub-bituminous coal. Probably that made the difference.

Some very interesting stories here.

Pardon my ignorance, and please correct me if I'm wrong. I assume you can burn wood in a coal stove, but you cannot burn coal in a wood stove? If you burn coal in a wood stove, is a grate the only retrofit required? Thanks.

My Grandma used coal as supplementary heat when I was a boy (she had an oil furnace as her primary heating plant). We lived across the street, so it was my job to take the coal bucket out to the coal pile and fill it up; loved laying there watching a coal fire burn in her living room fireplace - it put out some heat!

Being the oldest boy, my job was to keep the fire burning day and night. Just a plain old coal furnace, nothing fancy. I had to hump lump coal twice a day and haul klinkers once a day. When I left for the army I didn't miss the work. When I was discharged, the folks had already put in a natural gas furnace. Everybody was happy. Times were much simpler then.

I just remembered that we had a coal yard in town, located on the NS Rwy and adjacent to the lumber yard - they made deliveries or you could drive your pickup there and have it loaded. Can't remember when it closed, but it has been decades.

Quality coal does not smell bad, but it has to combust right, no matter what coal you use.

15 years ago people were tearing out perfectly good stokers like this and replacing them with oil burners. You couldn't get scrap price for one. Now good used ones bring a couple grand.