How to Light an Anthracite Coal Fire

[Sedalia Dave]

 

 

 

[Dr. Zook]

Very Interesting, thank you for sharing!!!!

 

Alot of work to get this going and to think that many homes went thru this process every day to put warm food on the table & heat the house...

[Subdeacon Joe]

Take those egg flats and pour some beeswax on them.  Works much better.  I like that he uses the log cabin stack.  I've found that it works best for starting any fire.

[Kid Rich]

16 hours ago, Dr. Zook said:

Very Interesting, thank you for sharing!!!!

 

Alot of work to get this going and to think that many homes went thru this process every day to put warm food on the table & heat the house...

If you lived where it was COLD in the winter you never let the fire go out, you just did what is called banking it at night.

kR

[Stump Water]

4 hours ago, Kid Rich said:

you never let the fire go out

 

Yep.  And you still get up and check it/stoke it a couple of times between hitting the soogans & daybreak.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

My best friend's granddad (rest his soul!) stoked their wood stove with anthracite.
He'd only fired with wood or bituminous in the past.
Anthracite burnt so hot it cracked the cast iron stove.

[Sedalia Dave]

37 minutes ago, Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103 said:

My best friend's granddad (rest his soul!) stoked their wood stove with anthracite.
He'd only fired with wood or bituminous in the past.
Anthracite burnt so hot it cracked the cast iron stove.

 

Lucky he didn't burn the house down.  back in the late 70's when a lot of city folks were fleeing to the country, I remember a few house fires caused because because they used Bois d'Arc aka Osage Orange in their free standing wood stoves. The stoves got so hot that the legs collapsed

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

Sedalia Dave, THAT scares me and I'm FEARLESS!

More times than one I climbed up on this family's roof with a brick on a length of clothes line rope and knocked the creosote out of their chimney -- the one that serviced their coal furnace -- there was a woman in Cambridge who'd intentionally burn her chimney out every fall.
She'd take a paper grocery sack soaked in bacon grease, shove it up the draft hole and light it off.
Burnt like Hell itself was breathing out that brick stack!
Never set the house on fire, generally the fire department got called, the result was kind of spectacular.

But your example ...hot enough to collapse the legs on a metal stove ...

... BRR, SHIVER!!!

[Blackwater 53393]

We would occasionally burn hedge apple wood in the stove in my dad’s shop! The stove stood on cast iron legs  on a concrete floor.  If we burned hedge apple, we’d also throw in some hackberry or scrub oak with it!
 

The main thing we did was we never used wood that had been cut that year. It was always a year or more old and well seasoned. We also took the stove and stove pipe down every spring and cleaned it. I usually sprayed some heat proof header paint on the stove and up as far as the flue to prevent rust. Above the flue, the galvanized coating generally held up, so it didn’t rust.

 

We heated that shop with wood for several years, until he moved to a new place. We never had any problems with any of the wood. If it got really cold, we’d throw in a chunk or two of coal to augment the wood heat.

 

Edited November 6 by Blackwater 53393

[Stump Water]

6 minutes ago, Blackwater 53393 said:

The main thing we did was we never used wood that had been cut that year. It was always a year or more old and well seasoned.

 

I poo-poo'd sweet gum for far wood for many years.  Old feller said, "Let it seezin for two years, then it'll burn and not cree-sote yore chimbly."  

 

So I did.  I'm pretty sure that's what they use in hell.

[Blackwater 53393]

We had sweetgum trees around a shop where I worked in Georgia. Folks would cut them down and saw the up into firewood lengths, but when they tried to split ‘em, the axe would just bounce off of them!!  They’d bring the logs down to the shop and we’d stack them up behind the shop.

 

After a couple of years, you could split them fairly easily, but you could only burn a stick or two at a time because they would really burn hot and fast!

 

Years later, when log splitters became a common item, you could burn sweetgum and hedge apple that was cut and split in the spring and dried until late fall. 

[watab kid]

that was fun i need one of those - i love the heat from a fire like that , i like seeing wood flames but wood doesnt provide that steady even heat 

[Kid Rich]

We used to cut the trees down in the spring when they were starting to leaf out let them lay all summer and they would be nice dry wood by fall. The leaves would keep growing after they were cut and suck all the sap out of the trunk. I also burned quite a bit of elm. Only problem with it was it produced a fine ash when burned and would smother the fire if you didn't tend it once in a while. It split very easily IF you split it while it was green, if you waited until it started to cure it was very difficult to split.

kR

 

[Eyesa Horg]

I heated with wood, mostly oak and hickory with a mix of ash. Had a wood boiler I plumbed and wired in with the gas boiler. Same thermostats ran everything. Nice even baseboard heat and warm floors when I get wood boiler was running! Wish I had done that in this house instead of in floor radiant.

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

so a pot belly is a wood stove and a chubby is a coal stove?

[Abilene Slim SASS 81783]

A quick search shows anthracite coal can be had at 35 cents/lb. I wonder how many pounds the guy in the video uses in a season?

[Jiminy Cricket]

When I was a child, we had a 4-year rotation on wood.  Dad would cut the tree in the spring, let it set all summer, then cut it into firewood length logs in the fall.  Next spring, those logs went whole into a pile next to last year's pile.  Last year's pile was split with wedges and a sledgehammer over the summer and stacked next to the previous year's pile and left to age.  We burned the 4th pile to make room for the next year's trees.

 

'Course, once all us children were out of the house, he had central air and heat installed and bought a riding lawn mower.

[Stump Water]

2 hours ago, Jiminy Cricket said:

Last year's pile was split with wedges and a sledgehammer over the summer

 

Wood warms twice.

 

      - Henry David Thoreau

[Abilene Slim SASS 81783]

Did a further quick search on the economics of this. Kinda spendy. 
 

The outfit I found that sells the coal charges $829 for 2,400 lbs, delivered in sixty 40 lb bags. Freight runs $300-$1,400 depending on your location from their store in Ohio. 
 

Chubby stoves cost $1,200-$1,500 for a reconditioned one. I’m sure freight isn’t cheap for cast iron.
 

According to another site, they consume 40 lbs a day. Of course there’s a wide variable as temperature etc. and size of dwelling has a huge impact. Nonetheless, it’s a lot of coal for a season. 
 

I think these things are really cool, but there’s no way I could justify the expense. 🙁

 

Having said that, if you live in area without utilities, it could be a good investment. My son lives in Spain in area without utilities. His house is heated with a high-tech wood stove/furnace that fires  a hot water radiator system that’s pretty efficient. There’s enough wood on their property that they don’t have to buy it. 
 

Edited November 7 by Abilene Slim SASS 81783

[Stump Water]

13 hours ago, Abilene Slim SASS 81783 said:

The outfit I found that sells the coal charges $829 for 2,400 lbs, delivered

 

IRRC, my dad said they paid $5 a short ton, delivered, in the 1940s.