King Coal

With the Virtuoso manuscript out of my hands until the page proofs sometime in the coming weeks, and Roubo on Furniture not requiring my all-day-every-day reviewing just yet, I have begun to spend more time outside and in the shop.  Since I haven’t even unpacked all my tools yet, much less arranged them in an orderly fashion, it feels good to be up the hill puttering and actually doing productive work on projects.

It has been a fairly mild December thus far, which is a nice break after the brutal November.  One of the primary issues for the barn workshop is, of course, heating my work space in a locale with bitter winters.  Last winter my pal Tony installed a cast iron stove he’d found for me on one of his remodeling jobs.  It was a Coalbrookdale Severn stove, a bi-fuel Brit import no longer being made as far as I know.  Despite its compact footprint it weighs in at just under 500 pounds.

Since I was pretty busy with a lot of other things last winter I did not spend much time in the barn shop, so I only used the stove a few times because it takes so long to build up enough heat to be useful to me, while the kerosene heater gets the space warm in just a few minutes.

Now that I will be working out there more, and for longer stretches at a time, I have been playing with the Severn stove.  Yep, once it gets going, it is a terrific heat source.  But, its firebox is fairly small and I found myself going down about every hour to stoke it (it is in the basement underneath my shop, and the heat radiates nicely up to my space above).  I was talking to some of my wood harvesting pals about the use of coal as a fuel in this stove, and Bob said he had a pile of hard anthracite coal for me to try with.  I fired it up with coal yesterday and love it!  It takes a long time to get up to temperature, but once it does it burns long and hot, usually 8-12 hours per charge.  Even though I have not yet mastered the nuances of the stove — starting a coal fire is more complex than simply starting a wood fire, in fact the latter must precede the former — its performance is pretty impressive.  Yesterday it had the shop in the high 60s, which is a good 15 degrees more than I need.

I’ve seen the future, and it is black.  At least the “heating the barn” part.  I’ll burn my way through Bob’s coal pile then for next winter order a couple pallets of bagged anthracite to heat all winter long.  Soon I will add an in-stovepipe heat exchanger to extract even more heat from the pipe running up through the shop.  With January soon upon us, and the locals talk about January with a mixture of warning and respect, I hope to be ready.