Anthracite?
In 2015?
I thought I heard 40 years ago that anthracite (“hard coal”) was “commercially extinct” in the US.
(Well, except for the Centralia Fire).
Were additional deposits found, are we importing it, or did I either hear wrong/remember wrong/had a loony source?
On the other hand it is two to three times as expensive as regular coal making it prohibitively expensive for power plant use–perhaps that is what your source was talking about.
You might want to check the dates on this thread again.
Do zombies burn?
Get a good hot coal fire running and they’ll go up OK.
Well, she changed her username; not quite the same as being commercially extinct.
the things I noticed were:
Coal heats amazingly. Just one or two small pieces was equivalent in heat output to several logs.
and,
Compared to wood, it smells horrible.
having said that, I think it was coal i was burning, I bought some pieces at a shop in California from a sack to burn in my wood stove.
Beat 'em or burn 'em. They go up pretty easy.
Some quick points from the real world of keeping warm. I burn wood and coal in a theoretically wood only stove. The difference is wood draws air from the top, coal from bellow, so for optimum heat you need a great or some way of holding the coal up above the air control or you can ignore it and make do with less efficient burning. I do sometimes burn wood and coal at the same time without a problem. I might be lucky as the stove i have seems designed to burn neither fuel and the doors were put on upsidedown leaving the air control near the bottom, the wrong place for wood.
Basically all stoves are metal boxes for burning things, steel wont melt with either coal or wood unless you force air into it. Wood seems to burn hot and fast coal slower and at least here comes in cheaper and less trouble.
Gas wise, get a carbon monoxide alarm, thats just sensible, but stoves are usually leaky things but the gaps let air in rather than out. Warm air is less dense than cold so as long as the air in the box and chimney is warmer than the room it exits upwards so there’s no problem.
My parents bought a house right after they got married that was the classical Queen Anne Victorian that had that huge old coal burning furnace in the basement [and a pair of coal rooms complete with chutes for dumping coal into the cellar!] My grandparents more or less forced my dad into deciding to convert it to ‘city gas’ when they found my mom down in the basement one evening topping up the coal. Unladylike ROFL. [They would not have made any complaint if she had asked the family handyman/hired man to do it … but she grew up on a farm with no modern conveniences other than they had a water pump in the kitchen and didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t toss a few shovel loads of coal into a furnace last thing before bed.] I would love a huge old victorian with a coal furnace [if they could do the more efficient burn/less polluting burn stuff like they have with the catalytic wood stoves. I don’t know enough about coal combustion to know if it is possible.]