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  • From: bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Burning coal at home
  • Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2008 14:21:33 -0800 (PST)

Last week someone on the list said they had coal on their land -- maybe Drew?
This article is in today's NYT about people starting to burn coal again to
heat their personal homes...................

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Burning Coal at Home Is Making a Comeback

Laura Pedrick for The New York Times

Problematic in some ways and difficult to handle, coal is nonetheless a
cheap, plentiful, mined-in-America source of heat. More Photos >




By TOM ZELLER JR. and STEFAN MILKOWSKI

Published: December 26, 2008

SUGARLOAF, Pa. — Kyle Buck heaved open the door of a makeshift bin abutting
his suburban ranch house. Staring at a two-ton pile of coal that was
delivered by truck a few weeks ago, Mr. Buck worried aloud that it would not
be enough to last the winter.

“I think I’m going through it faster than I thought I would,” he said.

Aptly, perhaps, for an era of hard times, coal is making a comeback as a home
heating fuel.

Problematic in some ways and difficult to handle, coal is nonetheless a
cheap, plentiful, mined-in-America source of heat. And with the cost of
heating oil and natural gas increasingly prone to spikes, some homeowners in
the Northeast, pockets of the Midwest and even Alaska are deciding coal is
worth the trouble.

Burning coal at home was once commonplace, of course, but the practice had
been declining for decades. Coal consumption for residential use hit a low of
258,000 tons in 2006 — then started to rise. It jumped 9 percent in 2007,
according to the Energy Information Administration, and 10 percent more in
the first eight months of 2008.

Online coal forums are buzzing with activity, as residential coal enthusiasts
trade tips and advice for buying and tending to coal heaters. And
manufacturers and dealers of coal-burning stoves say they have been deluged
with orders — many placed when the price of heating oil jumped last summer —
that they are struggling to fill.

“Back in the 1980s, we sold hundreds a year,” said Rich Kauffman, the sales
manager at E.F.M. Automatic Heat in Emmaus, Pa., one of the oldest makers of
coal-fired furnaces and boilers in the United States, in a nod to the uptick
in coal sales that followed the oil crises of the 1970s.

“But that dwindled to nothing in the early 1990s — down to as many as 10 a
year,” he said. “It picked up about a year ago, when we moved about 60 units,
and then this year we’ve already sold 200.”

Dean Lehman, the plant manager for Hitzer Inc., a family-owned business in
Berne, Ind., that makes smaller, indoor coal stoves, said his stoves were on
back order until March. And Jeffery Gliem, the director of operations at the
Reading Stove Company and its parent, Reading Anthracite, in Pottsville, Pa.,
which supplies coal and stoves to 15 states in the Northeast and Midwest,
said the uptick in interest was the largest he had seen in 30 years.

“In your typical year you might have five, six, seven thousand stoves being
sold,” Mr. Gliem said. “This year it was probably double that.”

The coal trend is consistent with steep increases in other forms of
supplementary heating that people can use to save money — most of them less
messy than coal. Home Depot, for example, reports that it has sold over
80,000 tons of pellet fuel, a sort of compressed sawdust, for the season to
date. That is an increase of 137 percent compared with the same period last
year, said Jean Niemi, a company spokeswoman.

Coal may never make economic sense in areas far from where it is mined. But
in places within reasonable delivery range, the price tends to be stable,
compared with heating oil or natural gas. Prices for natural gas more than
tripled in recent years before plunging in the last few months amid the
downturn.

Coals vary in quality, but on average, a ton of coal contains about as much
potential heat as 146 gallons of heating oil or 20,000 cubic feet of natural
gas, according to the Energy Information Administration. A ton of anthracite,
a particularly high grade of coal, can cost as little as $120 near mines in
Pennsylvania. The equivalent amount of heating oil would cost roughly $380,
based on the most recent prices in the state — and over $470 using prices
from December 2007. An equivalent amount of natural gas would cost about $480
at current prices.

Mr. Buck said he could buy coal for $165 a ton. On a blustery afternoon
recently, he was still studying the manual for his $2,300 Alaska Channing
stoker, which gave off an intense heat in the den where he had installed the
unit. An automated hopper in the back slowly dispensed fine anthracite coal
chips into the stove’s belly, and every couple of days, Mr. Buck emptied the
ash. He said he hoped the coal stove would cut his oil consumption in half.

“Now, somewhere, you’ve got to take into account the convenience of turning
up your thermostat, versus having two tons of coal to shovel and the hopper
and ashes to deal with,” Mr. Buck said. But if the $330 worth of coal in his
makeshift bin “heats the house for the winter,” he added, “you can’t beat it.”

Wesley Ridlington, a homeowner in Fairbanks, Alaska, bought an outdoor coal
furnace for $13,000 in March and uses it as his main source for heat and hot
water.



On a recent evening, as the temperature hovered around 23 below zero, Mr.
Ridlington worked to free up the rotating burning plate inside the furnace,
which he figured was jammed by a pebble. He did not seem to mind the glitch,
or, for that matter, loading the furnace twice a week and emptying the ash
pan every night. “It takes a little bit of time,” he said, “but for the
savings, it’s worth it.”

Mr. Ridlington said he was typically burning 1,500 gallons of oil each
winter to heat his 3,300-square-foot home. At last year’s prices, that would
have cost about $7,000, he said. This winter, he expects to burn nine tons of
coal at a cost of about $1,400.

“The initial cost was expensive,” he said. “But in three to five years, it’ll
be paid for, even with prices going down. And if fuel goes back up again,
it’ll be even more savings.”

Rob Richards, who owns a business in Fairbanks that sells spas, pool tables,
and now outdoor coal furnaces, said that when oil prices were higher, he
could promise fuel cost savings of more than 75 percent and a payback of 18
months for an outdoor coal furnace. With oil prices down again, orders for
furnaces have dropped off, and the savings are closer to 50 percent with a
few years’ time to recoup the cost, he said.

“Still, you’re looking at a quick payback,” Mr. Richards added.

Coal was a dominant source of heat for American homes for much of the late
19th and early 20th centuries. Americans were still burning more than 50
million tons of coal for heating in 1950, according to the federal statistics.

But coal, primarily used today in power plants and steelmaking, has not been
used for heating on a large scale for decades. Cleaner and more easily
distributed forms of heating fuel — including natural gas, electricity and
oil — displaced coal, and residential use dropped precipitously, to 2.8
million tons by 1975, and then to less than 500,000 tons by 2000.

Even with the recovery of the last couple of years, residential use of coal
in the United States, at less than 300,000 tons today and representing a
fraction of 1 percent of all coal use, is “not even a blip on the screen,”
said Carol Raulston, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association.

Still, even amid the steep decline, small upticks similar to the current one
have appeared from time to time, and residential use of coal never entirely
went away — particularly among people who lived near mines and had access to
cheap coal.

In Homer, Alaska, fall storms wash crude coal onto the beach from underwater
deposits. In the mountains of eastern Kentucky or the hills of central
Pennsylvania, residents can simply dig it out of the ground.

“As long as people have been mining coal up there,” said John Hiett of
Kentucky’s Office of Mine Safety and Licensing, “people have burned coal in
their houses.”

Government data suggest that about 131,000 households use coal as their
primary source of heat, with perhaps 80,000 more using it as a secondary
source. Those numbers are small enough that issues relating to pollution and
greenhouse gas emissions have remained largely off the radar.

Burning coal does throw fine particles into the air that can pose problems
for some people, similar to the problems involved in burning wood — though
wood stoves and fireplace inserts are increasingly subject to regulation to
cut down on pollutants.

“Coal stoves don’t have that,” said James E. Houck, the president of Omni
Environmental Services, a firm in Portland, Ore., that tests air quality.
“And there’s no regulatory pressure for them to have it.”

In some localities where residential coal burning is becoming a factor, that
might be changing. In Fairbanks, air quality experts suspect the increase in
coal burning — along with increased wood burning, including green wood — is
contributing to concentrations of fine particles well above federal limits.

“We see it as a real health hazard to Fairbanks,” said Jim Conner, the
Fairbanks North Star Borough’s air quality specialist.

Concerns like these have not deterred companies marketing coal. Back East,
the Blaschak Coal Company, a midsize supplier of anthracite in Mahanoy City,
Pa., still emblazons company trucks and baseball caps with images of Santa
Claus lugging a sack of coal.

“Everybody’s looking at wherever they can to save money,” said Daniel
Blaschak, a co-owner of the company. “Cause guess what? We no longer have
disposable income. We are up to our necks in debt. And there’s very few
things we can’t live without, but heat is one of them.”













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