I loved when I moved my wood stove into the basement at my other house but it was a walk out basement and I wheelbarrow wood in. A full one would be enough for a day. J also put more by the stove. But the bark mess an dry wood had the potential for a bad fire that would burn the whole house fast especially since fire loves to go up.

Wood pop and sparks coming out when I would load it always made me nervous and I keep it clean up very well sweeping everything time I was down there.

The heat did rise and go up the stairs nicely. I also cut a hole in the duck return vent right behind the stove and near the celling so it would suck in the hot air and circulate it through the house when the furniture blower was turned on.

My wood/coal bin is in another room from the wood stove. There is a walk through door that goes between the two. The wall between them is a cement wall. I used to heat with stoker coal and could get ten plus tons of WY stoker in the bin. It would last me about a season and a half with no other heat source. The old coal furnace finally gave out and I replaced it with propane farced air and put the wood stove in. When I stoke the wood stove in the morning, by the time I come back up stairs I can feel the difference in the living room above the wood stove. I like having something that wi9ll run with out power. We loose electricity at least once a winter. The longest was for five days. I had the coal furnace then. It was cooler than when the blower was working, but I knew the pipes would not freeze at 60 degrees.
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The outfitter I hunt with in WY heats his lodge,2 cabins and his house with an OWB that burns coal. He uses 5 ton/winter @$30/ton. Cheap heat!

My Boiler is on the way to my fur shed. My wife usually has the path shoveled to both Boiler & shed. Hard working farm gal that refuses to buy propane !

Don’t know of a place that even sells coal around here. Don’t know of a person that even burns coal anymore anywhere in the North. It was popular in Chicago when I was a kid growing up.

The outfitter is close to the Powder River coal mine. A friend heated his house with 3 ton of coal one winter. He burned a volleyball size hole in the grate, so he ordered coal grates from Heatmor and he was set to burn coal. I tried coal on -30F nights and made a wood burrito, wood on bottom, bag of stove coal and wood on top. Really did the job but coal is $8/bag here in NY.

The WY usage made sense being it’s mined there it’s just strange it looks like it was never used in this area that I’ve ever come across. I’ll need to ask around some but not many old timers around now.

As a kid growing up in a house that had a coal / wood forced air furnace in the basement, when it got rough outside, parents would opt for coal. Could go to town and buy it at the coal yard. Two grades......low grade bituminous or high grade anthracite........if memory serves, latter was called IL coal and was more expensive, but burned cleaner and hotter.

Another concept that is hard to wrap your head around........like old joke about which weighs more....pound of feathers or a pound of lead.......trick question......they both weigh a pound. Wood is the same way. They claim a pound of balsa wood has same BTU as a pound of white oak. One may be the size of a volleyball, the other the size of a tennis ball but a pound is a pound. So wood really ought to be sold by the pound vs. volume like a cord.

And if you can deal with the fireworks, the most dense of all is osage orange........or hedge. Always comes with dire warning.......if you use that, be careful as it will melt your stove.

Coal is $600 a ton here but I still burn it. Transportation costs to the northeast makes it expensive. The last time I tended this stove was around eleven hours ago and it's still cruising along at 500 degrees.

Knew a family that heated a huge old non insulated home using used oil they would get for hauling it away. One yet they got ear corn from a field that got flooded before got picked. They tossed in too much at once and that old early morning stove was glowing red all the way to the chimney. Burnt the grates out of it. They had the windows and doors open for hours trying to get it cooled off.

We had a coal/wood combo stove in the kitchen of our farmhouse. Mom would burn wood all day and "bank" it off with coal for the night. Our morning wakeup call was her running the shaker grates to get the coal ashes into the pan.

I haven’t seen anyone say a bale burner I know some guys that use them to burn cornstalk bales and like them.

I've been burning a Central Boiler outside wood boiler since 1998. Used a wood stove before that. My boiler is 130 feet from the house in a covered wood shed. I harvest the trees from my own land. I pull them right up to the shed with the tractor, pick them up with my pallet forks, and block them up off the ground. No bending over. I only move my cut wood about 15 feet into the shed. Some people grow and harvest gardens, I harvest the forest. I feel like my heat and hot water is free. I love working on the wood. For me, an outside boiler is the only way to go.

Sounds like a good setup.

The last Wy stocker I bought was $110 a ton. It was $35 when I first started burning it. I can get it in Minot about 25 miles one way. They sell Lignite, which is mined in ND, but it is softer and doesn't not burn as clean. There are quite a few places that burn coal here. Both homes and business. Some are set up to auger the coal into the furnace and auger the ash out. My stove had a hopper that would hold a few days worth of coal and was augured into the furnace. I would shovel coal in too to keep from having to fill the hopper as often. I liked the coal heat.

Coal is nice hot heat smell of the smoke not so much.

The smell of coal smoke meant heat, so it didn't seem that bad to me.

I like it when it's black smithing, but compared to hard wood smoke when it's out in the yard non stop not so much. But I got high sulfur strip minc coal from a mine here in Indiana had a bunch of clankers. I also didn't want to put the coal ash and clankers in the garden not thinking it would be good for it. All the wood ash goes on the garden.

Coal sure did burn long and hot. I would try it again if I had a cost effective source.

You guys seeing smoke from coal must be burning bituminous. Anthracite produces zero visible smoke and no odor. I've been burning it for more than a decade. I love it.

I'm sure there is something to this. I'm uneducated about coal. Bought a coal rated stove drove to the mine I was told would sell it to me got 3.8 ton on my flat bed trailer and drove it the 1.5 hrs home. Our mines are strip mines high sulfur I heard. No idea what it's called. Makes a green tint smoke my closest neighborhood and friends wife didn't like it with her breathing problem. And they are not real close to us. I couldn't keep it lite with coal only had to mix in wood. Figured it was very poor coal most likely. Never have seen a source anywhere around for anything else . I think that mine has since closed.