[Username1]

They have coal right down the street $255/ton, I get it myself in my pickup 1/2 ton
loads at a time. Less time consuming and easier to manage than wood. My house has
electric heat. Heat pump supplemented with 12KW toaster coils, like a big hair dryer
in the middle of the house. Also air solar panels in a room behind the garage. The solar
panels save us over 20% heating most years. Back there is a little room with the solar
plumbing, so I built a coal furnace that uses the solar plumbing on cloudy days. This year
I made a extra duct switch to gang the two together, so on solar days I can also use the
stove, just pass the hot air through both.

This area I call un-improved, as it has wells, septic, and no natural gas. So the trucked
in fuels are used here for everything. Most is home heating oil. For some reason our
house was kinda modern with all electric stuff inside. I was not thrilled with it, but
over time made improvements in the heater, and solar, and added the coal....

This guy was not always a coal dealer, when I built my stove I got the coal from a guy
in Pa. but I think the cost of diesel made it harder for him to compete on long hauls.

I have no idea how much heat my stove/furnace puts out btu wise, I use to run it all
day and night, but it is just too much as it needs to eat every hour or two. It's not automatic.
So now it runs days, and I have it shut off around 12 midnight and the coils run if needed....
I have various fans running blowers on appliance timers turn it off 2 hrs after
the last feeding. Same timers run the solar fans, just turn it off for cloudy days.
I will say that our electric runs up to $5k on the worst winters before I
repaired the solar, added the coal, and turned off the heat pump. The heat pump worked
ok until the defrost would kick in, then the 2 hours it took to get the house warm
would be wiped out in 15 minutes when it would reverse to unfreeze the outside
unit. It was a stupid system for this area, and the heat-freeze cycle was never
ending, I think the O&R people had our house pay most of their stock dividend
each year.... They must have thought we had a pot farm in the garage....

At first I thought it was a chevy....

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