Burning a Bit of Bituminous

I have about 40 lbs of bituminous lying around, from my railroad days. I broke it up into pieces about 3 inch at the largest. I was thinking of burning it tonight (I remember how much smoke it makes, and wish to draw no neighborly attention). Anyone see a problem with doing so in an anthracite stove?

Bit tends it to to produce more soot than anthracite and smoke a lot more. It can also smell of sulfur. Try burning a bit of bit and see (and smell) what happens.

I laid about 5 bigger chunks on top of a nicely burning bed, the closest to the glass door being about 5 inches--but that was close enough to darken a 4" area of glass with soot. Yeah, I got a nice sulfury whiff when I opened the fill door to try to break up those pieces a little. They were already fairly well burned but had seemingly melted into mini clinkers. I broke them up well enough, I hope, to get thru the grates.

Not too bad, but this was an experiment I probably won't be repeating anytime soon.

Burning anthracite is like burning Natural gas or Propane.. clean heat, very little smell etc.. Burning bituminous is like buring a bucket of old motor oil.. smokey, smelly and dirty..

UNLESS you have a made-to-burn-Bituminous stoker stove , then it is quite managable, and civilized.. but the bituminous stoker stoves are pretty rare..

I burned 4.5 tons of Bit coal and 5 tons of anthracite one season in my hand feed 'Big Bertha' boiler,, I learned a lot.. and now burn antharacite only in a stoker boiler..

Greg L.
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The Warm Morning stoves (I have the Model 400) were optimized to burn bit. They feature 4 internal flues inside the firebox. Imagine 4 little chimneys in each of the corners of a firebox, each with blue flame shooting out of the them! It is a really cool thing to see. It burns up the volatiles from the bit so that there is little smoke produced, and keeps down the soot, although it does not eliminate it completely.