Another Newby

Post Reply
 
graystork
Member
Posts: 56
Joined: Sat. Dec. 04, 2021 11:13 pm
Location: Voorhees, NJ
Hand Fed Coal Stove: Federal Airtight 2261
Coal Size/Type: stove or nut
Other Heating: gas furnace - municipal hookup

Post by graystork » Sat. Dec. 04, 2021 11:53 pm

Hi folks,
Looking for some advice on using coal heat and this seems like the best place. I live in South Jersey about twenty minutes from Philly. My house is about 2400 sq feet and has a municipal natural gas hookup and furnace. The question arises about the fireplace in the front living room on the main floor. Presently has a gas log hookup that hasn't been used in about 20 years. Hated the gas log, looks fake and of course doesn't give off any heat. It's vented through a brick chimney that's probably original to the 1960 house but seems to be in good shape. I would love to have a fire in it occasionally, or have it usable if and when the electricity goes off. But I have no interest in the work and mess involved with wood.

Coal seems like a good alternative and I've been looking at the Keystoker HF 70 insert. Don't need a lot of heat maybe 60-90 BTU's just to heat maybe two rooms on the bottom floor. Master bedroom is directly over the living room too. So what I'm really looking for is an emergency back up, or something I can fire up for maybe the weekend at most. Also have thought about the Vogelzang Rancher stove at Tractor Supply. No real coal dealers that I know of here, but I'd plan on using bagged coal from Tractor Supply.

My question for you is, am I barking up the wrong tree on this? Is what I'm looking for (basically a vented wood fireplace, but with the convenience of coal) doable, or is coal heat too much of an overkill for my limited needs? Thanks for any thoughts.

 
Hoytman
Member
Posts: 5990
Joined: Wed. Jan. 18, 2017 11:30 pm
Location: swOH near a little town where the homes are mobile and the cars aren’t
Hand Fed Coal Stove: Hitzer 354
Coal Size/Type: nut coal
Other Heating: electric, wood, oil

Post by Hoytman » Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 1:11 am

Welcome to coalpail.

I think wood is your best choice for just a couple days of burning. Coal is lots of ash twice a day and once the fire is started anthracite needs a full load of coal to burn correctly. That means full up and to the top of the fire bricks...and that means once it is going it will burn several days and won’t readily go out unless you force it to.

With the right wood insert and IF you buy wood, then wood is no more work than the coal. In fact, the coal will be more work.

Again, this is only if you buy your wood.

What would be the right insert that I am talking about? A Blaze King insert. With these you will get comparable long burn times as coal if you want with less tending. You can start a weekend fire and only tend once. Let it go out. You can do this many, many times before ever taking out the ash because they have such deep fire boxes, 6”-9” deep depending if you get a Princess model, or a King model. Each would hold many weekends worth of ash.

I am not trying to talk you out of coal, but for 1-3 days burning they don’t fit your description...even for a weeks burn they don’t fit your description.

Many of us coal burners light one fire all year with one match and that is it. No start and restart, unless there is a problem and it goes out which is rare except for newbies. Most often that one fire gets started in early to mid fall and we burn it until the weather warms up. It also means tending twice a day, every day in the coldest weather and taking ash out twice a day everyday and having a place to dispose of it.

Not trying to talk you out of coal, just being honest. The BK wood insert I mentioned would cover you just in case you ended up really liking having a wood insert burning in which case you would likely want to burn more and burn more often. The Blaze King stoves and inserts have the longest burn times of any wood stoves made (30hrs to 40hrs depending on model) and they have a long well established history of it. At the same time they have a long established history of the cleanest burning wood stoves on the market. Buying one will allow you to load a few pieces of wood for your weekend burn and let it go out. Or it will allow you to load full for long burn times and lots of heat with very little work.

The BK wood stoves/inserts also have a thermostat for constant and even heat control like coal stoves. Just turn the dial for more heat or less heat and to set the heat to your room thermometer and it will hold it there for many hours. No heat cycles and major room temperature swings like normal wood stoves. They also have cooler chimney temperatures as well.

If you have to cut your own wood and like doing it, you are still ahead to go this route for the style of burning that you mentioned.

You will need a moisture meter to make sure your wood is seasoned enough, below 20% moisture content. These meters are relatively cheap...$15 to as much as you want to spend.

If cutting wood is not something you think you want to do, then a wood pellet insert might even be a better fit yet. Just know they run like hell when they are well, and when they’re not well they can be hell to work on. Mostly electronics go out after a 4-5 years. Still, might be a good fit for you and even less ash than the BK wood insert I mentioned.

If you change your mind about how long you think you will burn, then reading many posts here about coal stoves and coal burning can help you with the final decision. Coal heat is constant and even, but it takes effort learning about coals burning characteristics, how to burn it by doing it, and it takes a few minutes tending time a couple times a day most days.

Also know that if you don’t research it and learn about it burning coal can be dangerous. You will need carbon monoxide detectors for wood and coal, but coal can cause explosions in your stove and chimney big enough to damage the house if you don’t take the time to learn about it and how to use it. Once you research and learn about it, then it is safe use. In that regard wood isn’t nearly as dangerous as far as explosions are concerned and doesn’t require extensive research.

With anthracite coal there is zero chance of a chimney fire in a clean chimney. With wood you always need to be aware of creosote in your chimney that can easily catch fire. The Blaze King wood inserts I mentioned also help you here because they burn the smoke with a catalyst inside the stove. These greatly reduce the chance of creosote build up and therefore less chance of chimney fires and less creosote when cleaning the chimney. Chimney’s burning wood need checked and cleaned twice a season, minimum. Catalysts in the wood stove can last 3-5 years of every day constant burning if you clean them regularly. They will last much longer with only weekend burns. That keeps replacement cost of $200-$300 for a catalyst down for a long time. Meaning you won’t have to buy a catalyst for quite a few years, maybe a decade or more, and that’s a good thing. They last about 12,000 hours of burning.

You don’t have to fool with any of that with coal.

Starting an anthracite coal fire also takes quite a bit more effort and sitting in front of the stove.

There are likely some things I missed and I’m sure others will chime in, but for now you have some things to consider.

Stay away from anything Volgelzang and other stoves at TSC ... except for TSC nut coal. LOL!

Hope this was helpful.

 
Hounds51
Member
Posts: 556
Joined: Sat. Feb. 22, 2020 9:46 pm
Location: Bethel, Pa
Hand Fed Coal Stove: 2 Legacy TLC 2000 one in the upper and 1 in the lower part of the house
Coal Size/Type: Wood and pea, nut ,stove and egg coal

Post by Hounds51 » Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 8:18 am

We love TSC, but we stay away from their wood and coal stoves. You might save money in the short run, but you will pay big in the long run. As mentioned above, if you are going to buy a wood stove, then buy quality you won't be sorry. If you would buy a coal stoker, you don't need to worry about having deep coal beds and you can fire it up for a couple of days and not have to worry about all the start up procedures that us hand fired coal stove people do. My son has two Keystone stokers and he loves them. The only downfall is that if you loose electricity, you loose your heat. Either way you go you will need to purchase at least 1 if not 2 Co detectors. Without those, you are taking a big risk. You might want to check out Keystone coal stokers. They are made up near Pottsville Pa. and they are fairly high quality and parts are readily available. Just my thoughts. Oh yea if you buy a stoker, they burn the finer grade coal like rice and wheat coal.

 
Shaun643
Member
Posts: 158
Joined: Sat. Nov. 03, 2018 11:44 am
Location: Peck Mi" in the thumb"
Hand Fed Coal Stove: Hitzer 50-93
Coal Size/Type: Nut and pea

Post by Shaun643 » Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 9:10 am

I also believe you would be better off with burning wood. VERY FIRST THING!!! get your chimney inspected please. Contact your local fire department and ask about a chimney inspection they will be able to help you or tell you someone you can call.

As stated above you will be better off burning wood. You can have a fire in the evening to take the chill off or in the morning or an all day fire. With coal it's at least a 2 day all day fire. I personally have a Hitzer 50-93 and I only touch the stove once a day to shake grates and load hopper.

It sounds like your house is two story and you want to heat the stove room and maybe one other room. No matter coal or wood you can't pick what room gets heated yes you can close doors and keep most heat out that way. Just don't think your only gonna heat two rooms is all. With that being said don't look at small stoves thinking your not heating that much. No matter coal or wood stove it's hard on the stove to burn them at their max capacity.

With a large wood stove you can have a small fire in the firebox and not do any harm to the stove. Say if you go a day or more in the winter with no power you want to be able to easily heat your home and not over burn your stove. You would have a hard time with a small stove trying to make your home comfortable. It is the same way with a coal stove except a coal stove must always be full of coal you just control the size of the fire with air.

Stick with any stove that doesn't require electric so when power does go out you still have heat. With coal you can get stoves that have blowers on the back those are ok because you don't need the blowers if the power goes out you still have heat. Stay away from pellet stoves and coal stokers those stoves must have power at all time.

Coal is a wonderful option for heating but I don't believe it is right for you. If you think that you would like to have a small fire going for a few weeks or a month or two in the winter to have nice heat then I would look at a coal stove. But if you honestly think you will only have a fire for a day or a week at most I think you would enjoy and be better off with wood.

My personal thought is weather you get a wood stove or coal stove once you get it burning your really gonna enjoy the heat and have fires more then you think. Their is nothing like heat from a stove. I have natural gas in my home with a forced air furnace my heater has not been on in 5 years I don't use it at all I heat my home only with my coal stove and before my coal stove I burned wood. That's how nice a stove is to me and my family.

Honestly look at stoves that have the ability to heat your whole home you will be better off then with a smaller stove.

Again first thing first is safety please get your chimney looked at and if your chimney is good choose what stove you want and then get some CO2 detectors.

 
User avatar
warminmn
Member
Posts: 8108
Joined: Tue. Feb. 08, 2011 5:59 pm
Location: Land of 11,842 lakes
Hand Fed Coal Stove: Chubby Junior, Efel Nestor Martin, Riteway 37
Coal Size/Type: nut and stove anthracite, lignite
Other Heating: Wood and wear a wool shirt

Post by warminmn » Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 9:21 am

I'd recommend a Chubby Coal Stove if you have a way to get it real tight to your chimney, almost like an insert. You can burn wood or coal in it, but lighting coal for just a few days isnt that difficult. Would be a good one for a backup situation as you can burn anything in it. Nice looking too.

If you have a couple hours to kill, this post will show you lots of setups and might give you ideas with all sorts of stoves. Post by TD - Pictures of Your Stove


 
User avatar
tcalo
Member
Posts: 2068
Joined: Tue. Dec. 13, 2011 4:57 pm
Location: Long Island, New York
Baseburners & Antiques: Crawford 40
Coal Size/Type: Nut/stove anthracite

Post by tcalo » Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 9:54 am

Welcome to Coalpail. I could not have said it any better than these fine folks here. Do plenty of reading, ask plenty of questions and best of luck!!!

 
Hoytman
Member
Posts: 5990
Joined: Wed. Jan. 18, 2017 11:30 pm
Location: swOH near a little town where the homes are mobile and the cars aren’t
Hand Fed Coal Stove: Hitzer 354
Coal Size/Type: nut coal
Other Heating: electric, wood, oil

Post by Hoytman » Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 10:36 am

Some good posts and things to consider that I didn’t talk about.

Never gave losing power a thought because it wasn’t mentioned. It is an important factor. I’m that case also consider Lopi wood inserts. You won’t get the long burn times of Blaze King inserts but Lopi may offer an insert, much like their stoves, that doesn’t need a blower to move convection heat out of the insert and into the room.

Also, the stoker was a good thought. Totally forgot about those.
warminmn wrote:
Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 9:21 am
I'd recommend a Chubby Coal Stove if you have a way to get it real tight to your chimney, almost like an insert. You can burn wood or coal in it, but lighting coal for just a few days isnt that difficult. Would be a good one for a backup situation as you can burn anything in it. Nice looking too.

If you have a couple hours to kill, this post will show you lots of setups and might give you ideas with all sorts of stoves. Post by TD - Pictures of Your Stove
Very good post here.

Never even gave the Chubby a thought. Sounds like it would be near perfect from heat for a couple of rooms on up to heating most of the house.

We all aim to please.

 
graystork
Member
Posts: 56
Joined: Sat. Dec. 04, 2021 11:13 pm
Location: Voorhees, NJ
Hand Fed Coal Stove: Federal Airtight 2261
Coal Size/Type: stove or nut
Other Heating: gas furnace - municipal hookup

Post by graystork » Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 11:23 am

Thank you so much gang. You have delivered a wealth of knowledge for me in just this thread. I will definitely go with wood. Thanks for talking some common sense to me. You guys rock!

 
User avatar
Lightning
Site Moderator
Posts: 14658
Joined: Wed. Nov. 16, 2011 9:51 am
Location: Olean, NY
Stoker Coal Boiler: Modified AA 130
Coal Size/Type: Pea Size - Anthracite

Post by Lightning » Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 12:00 pm

graystork wrote:
Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 11:23 am
Thank you so much gang. You have delivered a wealth of knowledge for me in just this thread. I will definitely go with wood. Thanks for talking some common sense to me. You guys rock!
One thing that should be kept in mind.. if the cost of natural gas keeps increasing, you might find it very economical to supplement your heat with a coal fired insert full time. But if the money doesn't matter that much, then an occasional fire with wood is probably your better choice.

 
User avatar
ShawnLiNy
Member
Posts: 618
Joined: Fri. Nov. 30, 2018 12:28 am
Hand Fed Coal Stove: Waterford
Coal Size/Type: Nut

Post by ShawnLiNy » Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 1:41 pm

Lightning wrote:
Sun. Dec. 05, 2021 12:00 pm
One thing that should be kept in mind.. if the cost of natural gas keeps increasing, you might find it very economical to supplement your heat with a coal fired insert full time. But if the money doesn't matter that much, then an occasional fire with wood is probably your better choice.
. Agreed another draw back to wood only is properly seasoning your firewood unless your buying kiln dried loads or sawmill drops whatever you get is going to need to age at least one year , don’t limit yourself to just a wood burner , get an older combo unit ( something with a secondary air inlet on the door or above the ash door somewhere ( for the single night use just burn wood /compressed blocks and wood gets the stove and room up to temperature fast and than you can switch to coal for the 2-3 day runs


 
Jerrybro
Member
Posts: 56
Joined: Wed. Jan. 28, 2015 10:34 pm

Post by Jerrybro » Mon. Dec. 06, 2021 8:17 am

Back when we ran an insert for backup I kept packages of bio bricks in the basement. They worked well and stored easy.

 
fig
Member
Posts: 1137
Joined: Fri. Feb. 12, 2016 2:36 pm
Hand Fed Coal Boiler: Harman SF360
Hand Fed Coal Stove: T.O.M (Warm Morning converted to baseburner by Steve) Round Oak 1917 Door model O-3, Warm Morning 400, Warm Morning 524, Warm Morning 414,Florence No.77, Warm Morning 523-b
Hand Fed Coal Furnace: Clayton 7.1/DS Machine basement stove/ Harman SF1500
Baseburners & Antiques: Renown Parlor stove 87B
Coal Size/Type: Bituminous/anthracite
Other Heating: Harman Accentra, enviro omega, Vermont Ironworks Elm stove, Quadrafire Mt Vernon, Logwood stove, Sotz barrel stove,

Post by fig » Mon. Dec. 06, 2021 9:32 am

If you do use wood. Most epa compliant stoves need seasoned wood. This means cut, split and aged for at least a year and a half. In some cases two years for hard woods.

If unseasoned wood is used in a stove with a catalytic converter it will plug the cat and eventually ruin it. Then it will have to be replaced. So you always have to be a few years ahead of your burn season. If you buy it, we’ll, anyone can say it’s seasoned but can you trust them.

The other type of epa stove uses secondary air tubes. They burn hot and fast. If you try to run them slow they’ll start to cause creosote. So they like small hot fires that need to be tended more frequently.

The other traditional pre epa stoves are frequently referred to as smoke dragons. No epa crap in them other then a baffle plate in most cases. You can get away with burning less seasoned wood in them if you get the stove pipe up to about 600* once a day to burn off any creosote in the chimney to prevent it from building up and causing a chimney fire. That’s how my dad did it. He always burned unseasoned wood. Mostly oak but he always threw in half a load of hedge apple and got it screaming once a day. I never saw him clean the chimney.

I’ve had a few wood stoves and the one I liked the most was the Woodstock Fireview. It’s a soapstone stove with a catalytic converter. The soapstone is double wall. It’s pretty efficient. Load it at night and still have a fire in the morning. The best thing is the soapstone retains so much heat that as the fire burns down the heat still radiates from the soapstone. The worst part about it was trying to stay two years ahead of it with seasoned wood in a area with hardly any trees or honest wood vendors.
Hearth.com is a good site to learn more about wood stoves if that’s the route you go. I like the ease of burning coal but it has become so expensive I may be going back to wood pellets or wood. Heck corn is even looking viable now. Best of luck.

 
WESOman
Member
Posts: 88
Joined: Sun. Dec. 01, 2019 5:29 pm
Hand Fed Coal Stove: WESO HSK125C
Other Heating: Oil-fired hot water boiler

Post by WESOman » Thu. Dec. 16, 2021 9:20 am

graystork wrote:
Sat. Dec. 04, 2021 11:53 pm
It's vented through a brick chimney that's probably original to the 1960 house but seems to be in good shape.

Call me paranoid, but I'd be very sure your chimney is safe. It is after all 60 years old. For the sake of draft and safety, I'd start with verifying the chimney condition. If it is not viable, the rest is rather immaterial. If it proves to be okay (with or without creosote issues) you can proceed to all the other choices. I would agree with others that for only occasional fires, wood would seem more practical. I never really liked burning coal early and late in the year or on infrequent mid-winter days when outside temperatures are milder and draft seems to be weaker. At those times wood seemed the better option. Now that I'm older, letting the oil-fired boiler do the work on those days seems a better option. Still, I believe everybody living in cold areas would do well to have a source of heat that can function if electrical power is lost and burn scavenged materials in an emergency. If all my water pipes froze, including my cast iron radiators it could become a labor and cost calamity.

 
Wal
Member
Posts: 454
Joined: Tue. Jun. 27, 2017 8:53 am
Location: Uk
Hand Fed Coal Stove: Deville 600 , Colombian stove works morning star nu22
Baseburners & Antiques: Red Cross garnet mica baseburner double heater
Coal Size/Type: Nut anthracite / smokeless ovoids
Other Heating: Gas central heating / antique cast iron radiators

Post by Wal » Mon. Dec. 20, 2021 4:09 am

If you are looking for a stove to burn wood or coal why not look to see if you can find a coalbrookdale Severn stove . Make sure it isn’t the one with the boiler attached, but the stand alone heater . I owned one and it is built like a tank , all cast iron and you can burn wood, coal , or both together . Only need to empty your ashpan every 24 hrs heat output is around 50,000btu heated most of the back of my house on its own . You can still get spares for them even though they have stopped manufacturing them . Probably be able to pick a good one up fairly cheaply . Just a thought . Here is a pic of mine before I sold it to buy a baseburner.

Attachments

D886A3E2-3102-46B3-8336-115DA4532D07.jpeg
.JPEG | 721KB | D886A3E2-3102-46B3-8336-115DA4532D07.jpeg

Post Reply

Return to “Hand Fired Coal Stoves & Furnaces Using Anthracite”