I had a potbelly and a garbage can full of coal but not sure I want to mess with it. I would be interested if there was one. I'm a curious type though.
It would be interesting but if only a couple members here have experience with it, the section will be pretty dead. Take a look at the boiler/central heating section we have already.
Installed a coal furnace in our old farm. The blower ran 24/7 driving the impressive heat it would put out. I'd shake down the ash and load about 4 shovel fulls of coal every 12 hours from Nov 1 to May 1st. Down in a dirt floor basement… my cave. Was back in my drinkin' days… had 99 cans of Lite beer on the wall. Coal is an interesting fuel. It's very dirty dealing with the coal bin but makes up for it when compared to wood. The burn is very impressive. Just keeps on keeping on, usually for an easy 12 hours. But, it will trick you often. About every 3 weeks, I'd make the mistake of letting too much ash build up and not enough hot coals left, before I'd try to add those 4 shovel loads of coal. When the coal is spent it doesn't get hot like wood does when you add air. It looks hot, but will go cold fast and there's nothing you can do but… clean out, re-start a wood fire first, slowly add coal until you've got that blue flame over a new bed of coal. Took about an hour to just get the bed going again. When it was really cold outside, I was not a happy camper. But, there was the beer…
My parents heat their place in Maine with a rice coal stove. It works similar to a wood pellet stove. It's made by a company called Alaska stove... (Which for some crazy reason is based out of PA and has NOTHING to do with Alaska.) http://www.alaskastove.com/model-140.html They are happy with it. My Dad said it makes a ton of ash though, and I've heard that from others. Basically the coal doesn't "reduce" like wood does. You put 5 gals of coal in and get nearly 5 gals of ash out.
I brought up the thread just to fill in the void left with no coal......pretty much everything else is covered....but there are a few really good coal forums out there anyhow......anywhoo, just an idea!
We're going to do some "revamping" on the site over the summer, LW........we may make some sub - rooms in the forum for some different subjects, we'll take that into consideration...thanks for the suggestion! We're still experiencing teething pains, we'll get there eventually. Thanks to the members (you included), it already is a great site....
