Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Ever heat with a coal stoker?

Green mark coal?

Coal boiler.


Wyoming coal.

I'm guessing a coal stoker is a furnace/heater that burns coal. If I'm correct, the answer is ...... no!

At Fort Lenoard Wood, if you wanted a hot shower, when the guy in the red helmet liner headed to the shower, you'd best not be far behind.

No, we use a Warm Morning 523 at the cabin.

I did for a time when I lived in AK. Picked up coal along the beaches of the Cook Inlet and burned it in a cast iron stove.

I grew up with a coal furnace but we did not have a stoker, we shoveled the coal from the coal bin as needed. You had to "bank up" the fire in the evening to help get you thru the night and it would still be cold in the house next morning. Round ductwork distributed the heat to each room via heat induction (heat rises), no fan.

My wife grew up with a coal stoker stove (Stocker-Matic) and cooked with a coal fired stove. They didn’t have running water in their home until she was in 9th grade. They did have a “pitcher” pump in the kitchen. memtb

Sort of. Grandparents had a coal-fired furnace in their home. It had an auger into the coal room which fed the furnace. The coal chute lead to the outside where coal was dumped into the room via shovel. Every few days you had to shovel the coal around to fill up the draw point once things started to get low. As the only grandson, I helped out with the shoveling when I was around. And went on coal runs to the mine in the fall with the 1 ton GMC and trailer to bring 5 tons at a time back home. That was a good furnace and would roast you out of there if you cranked up the thermostat. Nothing quite like the somewhat acrid smell of the exhaust on a cold snowy morning.

They also had two water heaters, an electric that was fed by another that had a heat exchanger in the fire box and a recirculation pump. All kinda of hot water in the wintertime.

Coal was something like $28/ton and I got it for free when I worked at Cyprus Coal. Ten tons was more than enough to heat the house all winter. Bituminous Central Ut coal was 12-13k btu/ton back then.

Yes. My grandparents houses in the Scranton area all had one in the 50s, 60s, & earlier. The warmest most even heat I've ever had.

Pennsylvania Anthracite was $100/ton in the early to mid 80s. A 2 story 150 y.o. farmhouse cost $500-600 for the winter. The new windows, siding, & attic insulation about cut that in 1/2.

Yes, we rented a house back in the '60s that had a coal furnace with an auger feed box and a coal storage bin in the basement. It was one of my chores to keep the feed box full by shoveling in the coal and also removing the clinkers from the fire box.

Same here. This was in the 40's and 50's The thermostat was hooked to a light chain that ran thru the walls downstairs to the furnace. Turning the thermostat cause the furnace damper to open or close depending on whether you want more of less heat. Each room with a ductwork had register that could be opened or closed.

SW Pa,we only had bituminous coal. It did not burn as hot as anthracite.

I was born and raised in Scranton.
Anthracite was $15 a ton.
Coal man would give me 25 cents for standing in the coal bin and spreading it around as it poured in.

We had a pusher stoker when we bought this house.

A Harmon, it operated off a timer setup.
A pilot function would cause the combustion blower and coal pusher to
operate for a set amount of time every set number of minutes.
I could adjust run and rest duration and
the pusher was adjustable for stroke length.

Supposedly the thermostat controlled the heat level,
except our house was about half the size the stove could heat.
And well insulated. So unless it was real cold, the pilot mode was all
the heat we needed, and I was always trying to balance time/feed/need
to keep the fire from going out, while not wasting $140/ton coal or roasting us.


Couple that with insufficient fue draw(figured out later) and we didn't
like the thing much.

The ironic part of the mismatched, poorly installed, cluster puck of a thing
is the former owners Dad was the Harmon dealer. He was the one that
chose and installed the dam thing.

Steamboat Springs 1965; the coal went into the basement window to a bin, shoveled from there to a hopper where an auger fed the boiler. The whole town smelled like sulphur both from the coal burning and the Hot Springs.

Knew a couple people that had them. The majority of us poor bastids heated drafty-ast houses with free-standing King-O-Heat stoves.

Been using an EFM 520 boiler to heat my house and shop for almost 10 years. Made the switch from a wood boiler and my only regret was that I did not make the switch sooner.

Burn around 8-10 tons per year last year I paid $140 per ton for a tri axle load of rice delivered from the breaker in Tamaqua.

Heated with a Losch boiler and cast-iron radiators in the 60s-70s. Dealing with the ash got to be a pain, switched to oil.

I grew up with a hopper fed coal furnace. Always warm. My dad switched to fuel oil heat a couple years before I left home. Froze my ass off then because unlike coal that has heat coming up even after the blower shuts off the fuel oil just quits.
I have also heated a house in Alaska and in North Dakota with lump coal. Nothing wrong with it. Edk

Yes but not at home. It was lump coal. The 2 schools heated with stoker coal. Fine grain and had some kind of oil put on it.
The trucker who hauled the coal into town always had my brother & me shovel it from the truck to the bins in the school basement.
He hauled with a semi so it entailed loading a scoop shovel at the front of the truck box and carrying it to the rear for the last 1/2 of the load.
But it provided spending money for us.