Anyone ever consider burning coal in their wood boilers?
Can it be done? Years ago Tarm sold conversion kits for some of their boilers.
Can it be done? Years ago Tarm sold conversion kits for some of their boilers.
The big coal-burner forum is http://nepacrossroads.com/ fyi... It's Anthracite you'd want to burn in a home, it's the really hard (high-rank) coal that's quite rare and only really mined in Eastern Pennsylvania as far as N. America is concerned. I've read the price is going up, some keep hearing that it's all getting sold to China or whatever, but $250-350/ton is probably a fair range depending on how far away you live from eastern PA. A ton of anthracite has roughly the same BTU's as a cord of seasoned Oak firewood by comparison. One advantage of anthracite over wood though, is you can damper down a coal fire pretty low without it going out completely or gunking up your chimney, you can literally "idle" the fire so long as the coalbed isn't plugged up with ash/unable to breathe.Gasifier said:Just out of curiosity. What is the cost of coal? Where can you buy it. I have never looked for it on sale around here. How does the price compare with wood, oil, etc.?
I got a 50# bag for about $10 locally and it may be slang, but it is "hard" coal and I think that refers to the PA anthracite. I went to AHS place before I dicided, and they had one of their Coal Guns heating (one of) their bldgs. it was an old dairy barn with a concrete silo right next to it like many old dairies. It was their coal storage. They had a screw conveyor into the bldg. and then a second auger that fed the boiler automatically. Very cool. I noticed no coal odor outside at all. It seem's that the soft coal is much dirtier and that gives the hard coal a bad rep. When my wood chopping days are over, I'm going with coal. (at least that's my current thinking) I think that bulk coal in PA is still around $200/ton! A ton of coal is about 4'X4'X4' (depending in the coal size, rice, nut, pea etc) and contains 25million btu's!Gasifier said:So 711. Where did you buy your coal where you live? Is that coal from Penn.?
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