My Coal Usage

Our house is all electric also, but we never turn the heat on. The only good thing about having this house built for electric heat back in 1972, is it is very well insulated. We only used the electric heat for about three years before I built a chimney and started to burn coal. We still use an electric hot water heater and in the the winter our electric bill runs around $110 a month. Thats not to bad for having one of the highest electric rates in the country. I don't even want to think about what it would cost to heat this house with total electric heat.
I had coal left from last year so I bought two full pallets of bagged santa coal, 120 bags for $672. That gave me a total of 156 bags which is enough for the season for me.
Now I'm fat,dumb,happy,and warm.

A guy here at work has a house that's like yours with electric heat.....$1000 per month to heat it.

Is that his total bill or above what he normally would pay?

I used to have winter months of up to 5,000 to 6,000 KWH monthly electricity usage (Dec, Jan, Feb) before I switched to heating my home with coal. Now my electricity usage is holding steady at about 500 KWH/month. Everything in my home except heat is still coming from electricity.

EasyRay wrote:Is that his total bill or above what he normally would pay?

total. summer months he's around $100 per month. So basically he's paying $900 per month for crappy electric heat.

Resolute0058 wrote:
My neighborhood cannot use fuels of any kind so the few of us that had stoves before that restriction got lucky. Neighborhood is 100% electric and the first year I lived there I was dying with a $450 electric bill each month that would barely drop to $375 if it was warmer and we turned it down to 63. Last year I spend ~$350 on coal to heat the home 95% of the entire winter season aside from when we traveled. I consider these things black gold with how much money anthracite has saved me.

I am curious what kind of neighborhood can restrict how you heat your house? Is it one of those all powerful Home Owners Associations I hear about?

I currently burn about 65 pounds of coal a day in my Leisure Line boiler. It heats the entire house plus hot water. Works great! House is a large ranch built in 59 and much of it is not so well insulated but I'm slowly working on that. I changed 6 windows in the house a few years back and cut my Oct-April coal use by a full ton.

titleist1 wrote:I am curious what kind of neighborhood can restrict how you heat your house? Is it one of those all powerful Home Owners Associations I hear about?

yup. planned development back in the 70's. underground lines and a mixture of standard houses and sections of condo's. Luckily, the original owner of the place got the stove and chimney in early. There's worse things, but electric heat is something I'll never flirt with again. I replaced the HVAC system when we moved in to make the rest efficient at least. winter is around $100 a month and summer is around $160 with the central air crankin. overall I am happy with the outcome and our 1.5 ton consumption for a whole season of heating.

looks like this warmer weather is determined to end the season. I decided to let it shut down for the season. no point in wasting the coal on over heating the house with the windows open anymore.

Easyray, you burnt less than a half bag a day, really? Need more detail, you have another source of heat running, ambient temperature? I'm easily burning a bag day in the last few weeks here in northeast Ohio.