Wood and Coal Stove Advisory

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Coal is for people who thrive on schedules. Once started on a bed of red-glowing hardwood coals and built up layer by later over an hour or so, a coal fire can be kept going all winter long.

On the other hand, a very well-organized accountant I know reduced his electric heating bill to nothing by installing a moderate-size coal stove in the family room. He starts his fire once in the fall and keeps it going till spring. He shakes down ashes and charges the stove with fresh coal before leaving for work at 8:27, again on returning home at 5:33, and just before retiring for the evening at 10:52. He collects the (toxic) ash in plastic bags and adds it to the trash going to the local landfill at noon on Wedneday of each week.

If you live a well-ordered life, a coal stove may be for you too. Get a stove designed from the ground up to burn coal—twice as tall as it is wide, the top half an empty box above the coal bed where hot gasses circulate briefly, radiating most of their heat out into the room before exiting into the flue. A coal stove needs no openings but a loading door on top and an ash-removal door at bottom, plus draft controls and an access hatch to service the grates—though a front door with a glass window is a nice touch.

You can get anthracite in bags or by the ton in bulk almost everywhere. If you are using an older pre-EPA woodstove, cost of coal is comparable to buying cordwood: from $100 to $150/ton for a top-quality brand name. (And don't buy no-name discount-priced coal if you can help it. Poor coal contains as much shale rock as carbon and is hard to keep going. Buy Reading or another old line brand. Be sure the coal is glossy black. (Dull coal with a grayish tinge contains clay.) Don't buy chunks of "Cannel coal" for a stove; this high-paraffin coal lights with a match and is meant for open-grate fires.

You can't burn anything but pellets in a pellet stove and can't burn coal in a wood stove. (Though some of the small, low Hi-techs are being newly-touted this year as capable of burning coal—a claim yet to be proven.) But in our bedroom is a little 2½-foot-high cast-iron pot-belly stove that was designed back in the 1800s to burn coal to heat passengers in Pullman cars. We burn wood in it. Above a little ash drawer with an adjustable air inlet, it has a small brick-lined firepot with a back-and-forth shaker grate . . . and above that, the familiar rotund heat-radiating chamber with an isinglass-windowed door. The firebox isn't much bigger around than a soup bowl—just right for a scuttle of coal. But I split birch and other mediocre hardwoods into kindling and feed a small, hot fire one stick at a time through the lid on the stove top. The stove burns clean and keeps the room warm but not too hot on the coldest winter evenings. The firebrick holds ash-banked wood coals overnight, so it fires right up when stirred and a few splits are added in the morning. I'd not suggest that you burn wood in an EPA-exempt coal stove, you understand, but if you do and live where the Smog Patrol prowls, keep your fires hot.

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