What do you know about coal heat?

yes

also a lot of conversion burners

around wwii

availability of electricity and oil burners

build out of the natural gas distribution network in the 40's and 50's

my house was built in 1913 in North Jersey and has a coal bin on the basement drawings. Then it was oil and now natural gas.

I have been thinking of converting it to a coal stoker if only I could find someone around here who thought that was a good idea

My house appears to have had a coal floor furnace when it was built in 1924. It was annexed on to the city of ann arbor in 1949, that is when it got municipal water and sewerage and gas. The city had a manufactured gasworks that went back in to the 19th century. I don't know the history of when that was taken over by michcon or when the system was hooked up to the natural gas pipelines without looking it up but I think there is an Observer article about it.

Coal was king for a long time. Oil burners although invented earlier really caught fire (LOL) around 1920.

So, the bulk of the work back then was coal to oil conversions. Why? The housewives had to maintain the coal fire while their husbands worked, and many were capable of doing that. I can remember my grandmothers talking about it.

Coal conversions to oil started probably in the 20s and continued up till the 70s for the most part. I started as an oil burner tech in 73' and most coal conversions had already taken place by then. Springfield, MA schools converted a lot of their schools from coal to oil in the 60s.

My grandfather lived to be 91 and was still burning coal in his house when he passed in 1971

I have sent you a PM.

leonz

Lignite? I know ND has huge deposits and some burn it there. World of difference from that gorgeous , glassy Pennsylvania anthracite.

Anthracite still heats a lot of homes, particularly in PA and surrounding states.

https://www.keystoker.com/

https://legacystoves.com/news/whats-so-special-about-harman-coal-stoves/

I do know that coal is cheaper per BTU than Wood Pellets, but I don't know how it compares to Oil or Propane - like all heating types (except possibly geothermal) it is more expensive than Natural Gas.

@ethicalpaul Done. 😀

Initially most coal was burned in radiant coal stoves. Gravity furnaces and boilers (steam or hot water) were used for central heating. Hand firing was first replaced by stokers in commercial applications once electric power was widely available. Stoker boilers for residential use became more common after WWII.

My home is heated by an “Electric Furnace Man” stoker boiler that I installed when heating oil first went to 4$ per gallon. If you have any questions about how it works I would be happy to provide more information.

also, here is a thread from a few years back:

Doorbells could be powered off of telephone dry cells too. Many rural places had 32 vdc battery systems powered by a windmill generator before they had utility power. People had electric things before they had utility power.

My home in Urban Rochester NY was built with electric wires in grounded conduit (i.e. largely code-complaint today) in 1920.

On top of that it had a natural gas boiler with a 24v thermostat in 1920 and was never coal or oil.

I discovered the thermostat wire was original when the original 24v transformer pooped out and I replaced it. When I removed the wire, I cut my thermostat connection - that had been running through a new transformer installed on the boiler.

It was a high-end tract home, but crazy to think that it hasn’t need these parts upgraded in 100 years.

where did the gas come from? was there a local gasworks or a local natural gas deposit?

Original residents of this residence (Coal late-20s->Oil ??s->Gas mid-70s) always maintained that coal-heating kept the house most consistently comfortable. I've always assumed this in part was due to the on-off nature of combustion with the later boilers.

Although presume room air-temp was as set by thermostat, with current gas, always complained "the pipes are cold" (between cycles on milder days). So wonder if the "continuous" coal kept pipes and radiators from completely cooling, with all the iron always providing at least some - even low - level of radiation or convection.

What I know is that coal is better than wood. And washed hard furnace coal is better than cheaper coal.

I have a story about the old days of coal delivery. The Reading Anthracite company had an advertising campaign that to be sure you were getting the real Reading Anthracite, you should look for the red spots on the coal.

As a Reading coal dealer in the 1940s and 1950s The F P Young truck may from time to time get a load of coal from a bulk coal yard without those famous Red Spots. That is when the can of Red Paint came out and of the storage compartment on the truck and my father would sprinkle Red Spots like the the Monsignor would shower the congregation with holy water on Easter Sunday.

You did not want to go back and shovel a ton of coal out of a basement because the customer requested Famous Reading Anthracite with the Red Spots. You know that my uncle Frank and his brother John (my dad) needed to do that once to keep a customer happy.

I remember that logo of the stick man with red paint bucket (lower right)

If this is to be believed (and there's no reason why not) Rochester was supplying gas to folks since the mid-1800s and heating by the late 1800s. That said, some neighbors to me clearly had coal heating as my neighborhood was on the outskirts of town. I just assume by 1920, one of the last annexations of my city, the gas lines were extended.

https://www.libraryweb.org/~rochhist/v60_1998/v60i4.pdf