When We Heated Our Homes with Coal...

Some of our radiators
were quite ornate

I don't suppose many people nowadays are familiar with the concept of heating our homes with coal.  But when I was born, in 1940, almost all homes in cities in the North were heated using coal as a fuel.  My family converted from coal to oil heat in the late 1940's, but I have a fairly detailed recollection of how the system of heating with coal worked.  I'd like to share what I remember.

In most homes where I grew up, in upstate New York, each room had one or more cast iron radiators.  These were usually located on the floor in front of windows.  Steam or hot water flowed through pipes that came up from the floor and fed the radiator to heat it,  A second pipe on the opposite side of the radiator carried the return water or condensate back down to the furnace, located in a basement below the ground floor.  Growing up, I didn't know of any houses that didn't have basements.

A coal-fired water heating boiler with stoker to supply fuel

A hot water boiler of the type
we had in our basement

Our house used hot water for heating, and there was a fairly large boiler in our basement that looked almost identical to the picture here.  Every year, my father would have it inspected and sometimes they had to repair either the internal brick work of the firebox or the outside insulation of asbestos and some kind of cement.  It was an annual ritual to clean and service the furnace.

Alongside the boiler was a metal tubular housing that extended about 6 feet to a metal bin.  This tube contained a motor-driven corkscrew device that transported lumps of coal about the size of walnuts from the bin into a cast iron grate that formed the "table" on which the coal burned.  The ash formed by the burning coal simply fell through the slots in this grate to collect in an ash container.  We always burned anthracite coal, which was more expensive than the more common bituminous coal.  The anthracite burned cleaner with less smell and formed very little ash compared with other coals.

A coal door

On one side of our large basement was the "coal bin."  This was a room about 10 feet by 12 feet into which coal was delivered from a truck outside of the house.  Some houses had a cast iron coal door in their basement walls through which a metal coal chute was inserted.  Our coal bin had a window in the basement wall that swung up on a hinge and hooked in place when coal was being delivered.

The coal trucks that I remember were low bed stake trucks.  The beds were filled with pre-measured canvas bags of coal, each weighing 40 or 50 pounds and having two heavy canvas loop handles.  The coal truck would pull up and park in the driveway alongside our home fairly close to the coal bin's hinged window.  One of the deliverymen would go into our basement to open the window and check the pile of coal still in place.  Then they would place a shiny steel trough that extended from the side of the truck through that open window.  Once it was in place, the team of two men would alternate dumping those heavy bags of coal into the  chute.  It was a noisy operation as the coal slid and rolled down the metal chute into the basement.  After five or ten minutes, the delivery was complete.  I recall that we got deliveries every three or four weeks.

We purchased coal by the ton.  Today, a ton of Pennsylvania bituminous coal will set you back a little over $50.00.  Anthracite will run close to $100.00 per ton.  My dad thought the world was coming to an end when anthracite broke through the $10.00/ton mark in 1946 or '47.  Today, comparing coal with fuel oil, coal is about half the cost per BTU of heat.  But that doesn't tell the whole story.  Let me fill in some details.

Once the coal was delivered to our basement, it was still a good 30-40 feet away from the stoker that fed the furnace..  On cold winter days, my father would have to go to the basement, shovel coal into a wheelbarrow, wheel it into the furnace room, and shovel that coal into the bin that supplied the stoker.  And he usually did this twice a day, morning and evening, and most of the time he did all this in a white, starched shirt.

Then about once a week, the homeowner had to shovel the ash from the bottom of the furnace and haul it outside to be collected by the city.  That was a particularly messy job because it created such a cloud of dust.  In fact, burning coal to heat one's home is a pretty messy proposition.  My mother complained all winter about how often she had to dust the furniture.

I remember the day they installed our oil burner.  It was a big deal.  Kalteux Brothers had a crew at our house at 7:00 AM on one warm spring day.  They emptied out the small pile of coal that was left in the coal bin and swept and mopped the concrete floor.  Then they began dismantling and removing the stoker mechanism that fed the boiler.  Soon, they were pouring a small concrete pad where a shiny new oil burner would be mounted in front of the firebox.  

They lugged a 275-gallon fuel tank down the external access stairs to the basement and firmly mounted it where only a few hours before had been a pile of coal.  Then they ran some copper supply line up from the fuel tank, across the unfinished ceiling of our basement, and down the side of a post they had installed next to the oil burner.  This was a simple affair that sprayed a jet of heating oil into a turbulent flow of forced air.  It had an electric igniter and was equipped with safety interlocks to shut off the flow of oil if for some reason the flame went out.

The whole installation was done in a day.  We were summoned to witness this new furnace in action.  There was a satisfying "click" when the foreman threw a switch.  A motor in the metal housing began to whir, a blower fan came on, and there was the faint "whoosh" of a flame being ignited inside the furnace.  No shovel, no wheelbarrow, no broom, no dust, no daily trips to the basement for my father.  We had entered a new era, never to look back.