BoatBanter.com - View Single Post

F.O.A.D.

On 8/21/13 12:55 PM, wrote:
On Wed, 21 Aug 2013 12:31:01 -0400, "F.O.A.D." wrote:

I had a coal stove in my Md house. I imagine my Ex still has it.

If you burned hard coal it was really pretty clean and didn't smell
bad.
I got lucky when I met a guy from West Virginia who hauled UHG hard
coal to Dahlgen a few days a week. I rescued him on 270 one night, got
him to the IBM Gaithersburg office where he could get a service truck
to get his truck going and the next day he dropped about a ton of coal
in my yard.
I bet she is still working her way through that. This was that real
shiny anthracite that doesn't leave any residue on your hands, burns
blue with no smoke. It looks like black glass. A few of baseball sized
chunks will burn for hours.

If I were building anew up here, I'd still go with gas heat units, with
earth-cooled piping for heat pump air conditioning coolant. Coal? No
way, Jose.

I probably wouldn't do it again but when I found that anthracite, I
found little to complain about. This isn't the garden variety high
sulfur bitumen most people think of when they think coal. I am not
sure what the Navy was doing with it but this was some pretty coal,
something like 98% pure carbon. I think it was well over $100 a ton in
1980 when I got it.

Down here, heat is not really an important consideration. We seldom
turn on any kind of heater. The windows are open most of the "winter".

We had some "cool" nights in NE Florida, but hardly enough to have the
heat on for more than an hour or two. The summers were AC All the Time.
This summer here has been warm, though we have had a few week long
breaks when the daily temp was in the low 70's. I really prefer southern
New England summers and NE Florida winters.