Does anyone have a coal stove in their cabin or know anything about coal stoves? Do they do a nice job of heating for long periods before needing reloaded? Do they burn a special type of coal or do they burn the type of coal that is used in coal fired power plants?
Mark
Vermont Casting makes one coal burning stove, the Vigilant II.
http://www.vermontcastings.com/content/products/productdetails.cfm?id=238
It's a great stove, well made and has an air inlet thermostat that works very well. (I had a wood burning version 25 years ago.) It can burn pea or nut size anthracite or bituminous coal. Anthracite has a lower ash content and will give more heat per pound of coal. Anthracite is also called hard coal, bituminous is soft.
Something in the stove has to be changed for one type or the other. Once you make a choice you cannot easily change to the other. There are probably others out there.
Coal may be more difficult to locate than wood. Check that out first.
Coal fires are more difficult to get going and are better suited to prolonged use over a cold winter. Not something you want to fire up for an evening. There's full info available for download on that web page.
As for whether or not it's the same coal as the power company; ask the power company what they burn.
We used to burn coal when I was growing up in Montana. My Dad had a 1949 Dodge pickup and he would haul whatever that little truck would carry from a mine at Chinook, MT. I would shovel it out of the truck when it got home into a storage bin and from there it would go into the house in buckets. We had a trash burner type stove in the kitchen (2 cast iron lids) and a larger stove in the living room. Both stoves were good for either wood or coal so we used a mixture. Coal didn't leave as much ash as wood but you would sometimes get "clinkers" which were hard contorted shapes in the ash. There must have been some metal in the coal that caused those. Wow, I haven't thought about this stuff in years. The one thing I can tell you for sure is that wood is much cleaner to work with than coal. With a coal fire however you could "bank" the fire at night and it would still be hot in the morning. The wood fire would be burned nearly if not completely out.
When I was a kid, we had a wood burning Kitchen stove that we cooked on. It also had a tank for hot water.
As the main heat for the house, we had a coal burning pot bellied stove in the (I guess you'd call it the den).
Good heat and not quite as much work as wood...but was it ever dirty and left a smell that was not pleasant at all.
Later in life when we got to be real fancy people rofl we had a coal fired hot water heating system. For those of you that are familiar with a Christmas Story.....Ralphies father's reaction to "a clinker" was pretty accurate.
It is a very dirty way to heat!!!!!!!!!
I house I grew up in was heated with a coal fired hot water and radiator system. The furnace was fed by a motor driven screw auger from a hopper that held several days worth of coal, more when the weather was moderate. There was a coal bin (like a big walk in closet) in the corner of the basement.
Two big jobs. One filling the hopper and the second hauling the ashes out to the ash pit. Oh and a third big job in a cold winter, when extra supplies of coal were needed. Shoveling a walk way from the lane to the coal dump hatch. The guy delivering the coal had to carry sacks from truck to house and dump them.
When the system was converted to gas it took forever to get rid of the black coal dust (when the bin was torn down.
Sure is nice to flick the little switch on the thermostat from cool to heat and call it a day.