Burning Coal at Home Is Making a Comeback

Lovely


Kyle Buck of Sugarloaf, Pa., fills a stove with anthracite coal as his wife, Kelly, plays with their daughter Lila.
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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.”

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/business/27coal.html?hp

to go along with the poverty and coal soot,that is...

I seriously doubt it. There are probably that many people heating with cowchips.

its relatively cheap, clean and carbon neutral, whats not to love.

Wood is fine.

big ass potbellied looking coal stoves that my dad would go up early and build a fire in and then the teacher had to keep them fed during the day. Open that stove up to put coal in and the smoke and dust would on some days fill the room. I'm sure it was really healthy too. I'm surprised that most of us kids didn't die from lung cancer long before now.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x55148

We'll add historical obliviousness to the fact that several million people die each year from the use of biofuels to the moral obliviousness of this remark:

http://www.who.int/entity/quantifying_ehimpacts/countryprofilesebd.xls">Most indoor air pollution deaths on this planet are from the wonderful practice of burning wood indoors.

You and the other kiddies are just full of love - at least in your own imaginations - but I still think that 1) ignorance kills and 2) you couldn't care less.

The matter of who much we should love wood burning is covered in considerable scientific detail in brazillions of places - more places than the brazillions of homes served by solar pool lights in Southern California.

For instance, in the journal <em>Atmospheric Environment</em> 42 (2008) 126–141 an international team of European scientists, lead by Hans Pauxbaum at the University of Vienna wrote a paper entitled "Chemical characterisation of fine particle emissions from wood stove combustion of common woods growing in mid-European Alpine regions."

Since you're too busy louging around in the dull light of the solar pool light, I suspect that you are, as usual, blissfully ignorant of the contents of this paper.

Like I always say, "Ignorance kills."

You have no fucking idea what levoglucosan, mannosan and galactosan are and are even more oblivious about their implications to human health.

Pauxbaum and another international team wrote another article entitled "Intercomparison of Measurement Techniques for Black or Elemental Carbon Under Urban Background Conditions in Wintertime: Influence of Biomass Combustion" (Environ. Sci. Tech. 42(3) 884-889 (2008)), but predictably you're blissfully unaware of the contents of that paper too, because you just don't give a fuck.

What is really disgusting about these times is that the vapid and the stupid are so clueless that they don't even have a clue about what they don't know.

"What's not to love?" indeed.

Ignorance KILLS.

How does any of what you just typed have to do with me or my burning wood pellets to heat my home. From my Pellet burning stove I get no, I repeat, no harmful gases into my home, none, zilch, and with very few spewed out the exhaust pipe either. In fact it is one of the cleanest methods of warming ones home. We use two tons of a waste byproduct, wood pellets, for the complete heating season, mid-Oct through mid-April. How do you heat your home anyway? Or do you just stay under the bridge all the time huddled around an open fire kicking and cussing all them empty fucking wine bottles strewn about and throwing wild eyed fits? I can just see you now, picking up first one and then the other bottle looking for a little corner, just gotta get your fix. Maybe one of these long nights the cold will have mercy and take you out of your misery, give you some peace as only your lord knows you need.

and your answer is "who cares what you think?"

If we could only figure out a way to concentrate and bottle that level of sheer ignorance, I'm sure there'd be big bucks in it somehow.

Or probably not....

For those who cannot grasp the idea, look at it this way- We have a huge fusion furnace at the center of our solar system. More energy hits the ground every day than we can use in a thousand years.
WE Have to learn to harvest it. I use the drapes and blinds to keep the warm in at night and open in the day to to make use of heat gain.
We have to change how we live or we all die. Period.
I realise folks live in apartment buildings, those are wrongly designed.
We moved to to country, I am setting up to build solar furnace to heat the house.
If you have a house with a south facing wall. Go to Northern Tool and look at Solar sheet.
It will not provide all of your heat, but can provide a good bit of it and take quite a load off of youur fossil fuel furnace. Every bit helps.
My grand parents used coal in there house when I was a little kid and it made my asthma trigger.
It is stupid to burn coal, frankly I think we can do better and make our lives easier and less subject to sheiks in the middle east.
I realise solar power , solar water heaters, solar panels take money and planning. What the hell is wrong with us, that we can't see beyond what is happening now? Waa its too expensive , cry piss and moan.
Look at it this way solar setups cost up front, but to run them after install is practially free and no maintenance, the bill from the gas or electric company comes every month.
We believe we can live without fossil fuels or nearly so. We are going to have to or we are all going to choke on the smoke. Anyone that poopoos is too stupid to actually look beyond what they want right this minute and Do Something! We are doing something. We are currently dependent on fossil fuel and wood to heat.
We have a 10 year plan to be fossil fuel free, or very close to it.

.. unless you are Republican....