If you need heat in the winter, you will decide to do what is needed for it right away for your family. Or at least I would.


I think the point is to put in a fuel system that will allow you to have a reserve to allow you to have heat when needed.

I think propane (extra tanks and keeping them topped off) would be a very good way of having a buffer. But coal or wood could also work.

There is no wrong answers to this, but each heating option has to be thought out and you have to come up with a workable system before the disruption.

I like propane, but without electricity a propane fired furnace will not work. You would need to have a few of those wall heaters (the vent less kind) that work without electricity.

Coal & wood also work without electricity.

Interesting comments. Coal, as you point out, ranges from "packed peat" to "pure carbon."

I don't know about "spoilage" exactly, but I can tell you that our local coal (sub-/semi- bituminous) will fracture into smaller and smaller "fines" if exposed to the weather. Pretty soon it's approaching dust in its consistency. This is mildly problematic for use as stove coal; I may need to mix it with sawdust and pack it in old tin cans in order to burn it.

Meanwhile, coal stored in a dry outbuilding is exactly as it came from the colliery. So your point about storage is quite valid.

I'd love to get a quarter ton of that Welsh Steam Coal to play with. Wonder how much it would cost to FedEx it here? (Kidding, I'm a kidder. ;-)

My fireplace is a hole in the living room wall, about 18" wide, with a grate at the bottom and a flue at the top. I'm afraid I use firelighters to light it - I put one on top of the unburnt residue of the previous fire, light it and pile fresh coal on top. I've tried using bundles of newspaper and wood kindling, which is what my parents use to do, but it's too much hassle and makes a lot of ash. Coal produces very little ash.

It's vaguely like the ones here, but not as posh.

We are certainly needing to look at alternate heating methods. In my neck of the woods Propane is now $3.07 a gallon. In this milder winter climate - a hundred gallons a month of LP is now $307 when it used to be about $100 just a couple of years ago. The local firewood guys know this and delivered firewood is very pricy too. And natural gas seems to be in toe with propane.

We continue to look at alternate heat sources - Now that our son is old enough to know better, we are returning to buring more wood in our fireplace insert (splitting our own wood, of course) and reducing other areas of propane use - like getting back to hanging our clothes out to dry. We have recently added PV Solar to our house with a battery back up. We expect little to no electric bills in the future and could effectively function off the grid should a legnthly outage occur. We are already on a well and septic, so we are pretty capable of maintaining the basics at our home despite the ever constant water/power issues that pop up in California (rolling black-outs, water restrictions, etc.).

Does forge coal work well for heating?

Ah, very sorry to stir up your childhood traumas. ;-)

Coal, for me, means the ability to bank a fire in a stove that will last for six or eight hours. On the coldest night of the year, with the grid down, that's worth its weight in gold.

As for Google, well, it's certainly useful; but an ounce of wisdom outweighs a ton of information any day.

Thanks for the description. I need to build something exactly like that as an insert for my wood stoves.

You must have a high grade of coal to light it so easily. Ours takes a lot of heat before it really gets going, and won't produce much heat unless there's a good draft all around.

Do your neighbours object to coal burning, or is it commonly used in your area?

It sounds like you're fairly self-sufficient already. It's a good feeling, isn't it? Contrary to popular belief, the world does not stop turning when the grid has a spasm. It keeps rolling on as it always has.

Coal isn't exactly "green," being a fossil fuel. But it can give you a stockpile of heating fuel to fall back on, perhaps as an insurance policy for one's efforts to be less reliant on the grid.

Around here, there's a lot of it very close to the surface. You can even dig out thin seams from rivers and creeks. It makes sense to be aware of readily available local fuel sources.

One of my neighbours has an outdoor coal-fired boiler that heats his house, garage, shop, etc. It seems to burn very cleanly -- no belching smoke or anything. All I get is an occasional whiff of coal in the wind, and that's probably when the burner is firing up. But we live in the country, and there's a little more tolerance for things like that. (Barking dogs, though, are apparently another matter.)

My understanding is that "forge coal" is a high grade of bituminous coal with a low sulfur content.

Based on that, it would have a fairly high carbon content. So I think it would be fine for heating.

But perhaps some of the members who work with steel could give a more learned opinion. Thoughts?

It should, in a properly designed stove - thing is, forge coal is usually very high quality (metalergic coal) - to allow the blacksmith to weld steel without imputities - typically expensive