by pa_friendly_guy » Thu Jan 24, 2013 4:10 am
I think you would need a grate mike to keep the coal going. Adding a small amount of coal might work to extend the burn some. A large amount would work like a blast furnace I would think. Matt said he gets 800 degrees at the top of his burn barrel. With coal you might get enough heat to melt the thin top off the barrel. I may not melt it off right away, but over time I could see that happening. I saw somebody on the net here say that they welded a piece of plate steel to the inside of the bottom of the burn barrel lid as a sacrificial piece that could take the extreme heat and burn away over time. I forget if they used 1/8 inch or 1/4 inch steel. Their thought was to extend the life of the barrel. You might want to consider the same idea if you plan on burning coal for very long. If you can get hard coal you will be happier from a clean burn point of view. It burns down to a white ash similar to wood ashes. Soft coal will give you a lot more ash and much larger chunks and can burn together to form a clinker that you would have to break up with a poker. Hard coal will cost more, but it gives off more BTU per ton and it comes in rice, small nugget, or larger nugget size. I have never burned the rice coal size but my brother in law had a stove that burned it. Very small fire box, put me in mind of a pellet stove as far as size of the burn box. It might have had an auger feed on it. I have used the small nut coal size in an old fashioned cook stove at camp and it works wonderfully. Holds fire over night and burns down to nothing as far as ashes. We dampened the stove way down at night and filled up the fire box full just before bed. The old camp was toasty warm in the morning with that old stove. I love hard coal. I live in the middle of the soft coal regain though, so every body around here burned soft coal for heat years ago because it was cheap. There was a Rail Road siding on my family's farm and years ago my Great Grandfather would buy a car load of soft coal and have them just let the RR car on the farm until it was empty. They would burn a car load a year. It was a large 2 story home that has been torn down now. The farm is being developed into houses.
Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has.