Hotblast 1357 With Bituminous Coal

I have done a little reading and am wondering what everyone's thoughts are on burning bit in my hot blast? I successfully burn anthracite now but am just curious, I don't even know if I can get it around here, Plattsburgh NY, but If I can at a lot cheaper price, then I'll try it, I do burn wood in the shoulder months

If I can burn it in my nestor martin without a shaker, you should be able too. Its all just a different learning curve and several on here helped me with a posting about tips on my Dad's Hitzer and I applied them to my stove.

You do real good with ant in a stove others have trouble with, you will figure it out.

Trying the Bitty Coal Again

Here's one of my adventurers in bituminous..

Thanks guys, I guess I will have to wait and find out if I have any sources of it around here, maybe if its good quality I can try it

Bituminous Coal comes in various qualities. Some is high volatile some low volatile. Member LDposse has written a few threads about burning bituminous.

The Bitty I used was high volatile nut/stove size and was very difficult to tame.. if I remember right, he used low volatile bit the size of cantaloupe up to football size pieces and was very successful with it...

Ok I have no idea if I can even get bit yet I'm still searching

hotblast1357 wrote:Ok I have no idea if I can even get bit yet I'm still searching

Might want to see if you can get a TT or dumptruck load delivered, but it can be hard to find a trucking outfit that will deliver across state lines. Failing that, see if you can find someone to loan you their dump trailer.

I took some videos this past winter of burning Valier's bituminous "oversize" coal in my DS1500. I will try to get them uploaded to YouTube in the next few days. If you can tame Valier's, I think you could burn just about any coal.

Lightning wrote:Bituminous Coal comes in various qualities.......if I remember right, he used low volatile bit the size of cantaloupe up to football size pieces and was very successful with it...

I had good luck with the large pieces of coal, and yes, there were some the size of footballs and basketballs, but they aren't very convenient to store in the coal bin, or fit through the door of the stove. The best burning bit coal for hand firing that I've used was from Cobra Mining in Barton, MD. They advertise it as "house coal", and it's a little bigger than nut size anthracite. They said it is mined from the "little inch" seam. It doesn't swell up near as much as the other low-vol bituminous coals I've tried, and is extremely easy to control.

Thanks ld, I have Berlin bringing me up a little of his bit to try, if I can tame it for a 10-12 hour burn and it doesn't smell too bad, I don't care about the smoke I used to burn wood, and I'm not to worried about my neighbors, and if its a lot cheaper then I would prob make the switch, my mother has a wood coal furnace combo also and that says for bituminous coal also so she will probably be making the switch too

If you want to burn bit.full time you will need to buy it by the TT load.

That would be hard to store, and hard to deliver to two places, I read somewhere that bit can be bought bagged, but I would assume being so far away from the source its not cost effective

With some effort one can bag up their own bulk coal...just depends on ones priorities.
Woven poly bags work very well.

Ask yourself...Is the savings worth my effort?

Well the only reason to buy bagged would be the options to purchase and haul it easier, if I'm left with just bulk I could bin it somehow

What if you were able to bag it yourself right at the supplier's?

I don't think I have any suppliers close enough.. But I don't know exactly where they are

I'll echo LDPosse's response. I'm using the 'Big Vein' coal also. My review of it, and a comparison is here: Big Vein Coal

It smokes for a few minutes after reloading my Clayton( a cousin to your hotblast), but then burns with no smoke and very little soot. I can get 12 hour burns but it will 'crust over' after 6 to 7 hours, then produce little heat.

The size of the coal I use is very small though, larger sizes should burn differently.