Coal For Christmas

The old warning that naughty children would only get a lump of coal in their Christmas stockings never had much effect on me. We really did not make a big deal about the whole stocking thing in my house when I was growing up. But then, we also exchanged gifts on Christmas Eve, a Norwegian tradition. Or maybe just out Norwegian family tradition. But now, getting coal in your stocking for some folks is a score, not a penalty. The use of coal for residential heating is on the rise.

Burning coal at home was once commonplace, of course, but the practice had been declining for decades. Coal consumption for residential use hit a low of 258,000 tons in 2006 — then started to rise. It jumped 9 percent in 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration, and 10 percent more in the first eight months of 2008.

Online coal forums are buzzing with activity, as residential coal enthusiasts trade tips and advice for buying and tending to coal heaters. And manufacturers and dealers of coal-burning stoves say they have been deluged with orders — many placed when the price of heating oil jumped last summer — that they are struggling to fill.

“Back in the 1980s, we sold hundreds a year,” said Rich Kauffman, the sales manager at E.F.M. Automatic Heat in Emmaus, Pa., one of the oldest makers of coal-fired furnaces and boilers in the United States, in a nod to the uptick in coal sales that followed the oil crises of the 1970s.

“But that dwindled to nothing in the early 1990s — down to as many as 10 a year,” he said. “It picked up about a year ago, when we moved about 60 units, and then this year we’ve already sold 200.”

When my wife and I lived in New York, we bought a lovely, old cobblestone house. It was built somewhere around 1827-1835. It was not a “fancy” cobblestone, with meticulous herringbone stone patterns and had been unoccupied for a number of years before we bought it. It wasn’t all that big, but it was well built with massively thick walls. It also had no central heat.

At some point, a previous owner had installed electric baseboard heaters in the rooms of the house. These cost a fortune to run in winter. My wife and I installed a coal stove insert in the old cobblestone part of the house in the main fireplace and a pellet stove in the newer addition that had been put on at some date.

They worked great. A lot of work, but heat was not a problem. Because of the house layout, natural circulation kept the house nice and warm, no matter how cold it was outside. That coal stove put out some serious heat, too. (We had to have a stainless steel liner installed in the old stone chimney to accommodate the stove.) I burned pea-sized anthracite in the stove. A ton takes up a surprisingly small volume and I built a smallish bin to hold it. Yeah, I had to lug coal and ash on a regular basis, but it wasn’t all that bad. It also kept the house comfortable.

Via Memeorandum

Something To Think About

Try to stay humble.

Second, consumers in many parts of the world are in relatively good shape. That statement might strike many as absurd, given the mantra of “consumers have been living beyond their means.” But it’s not just the third of American households that have no mortgage, or the 50% savings rate in China, or the still massive wealth accumulation in the Gulf region, Brazil and Russia. It’s that the credit system, even at its most promiscuous, didn’t allow consumers to take on the obscene leverage that financial institutions did. Millions of people who shouldn’t have been lent money were, either in mortgages or through credit cards. But they couldn’t be levered 40-to-1 as investment banks and funds were……..

…….The rush to declare the future bleak has obscured the fact that no one knows the outcome of an unprecedented event. No one. The worst course in the face of uncertainty is blind faith in conventional wisdom and past patterns. The best is to stay humble in the face of the unknown, creative and unideological about solutions, and open to the possibility that as quickly as things turned sour they can reverse.

The nonstop pronouncements of doom also have a certain self-fulfilling quality to them. People read them and change their behaviors based on a perceived threat. There are some troubling aspects to the speed of the downturn, but, as Karabell points out, there is no historical perspective here – the downturn is unprecedented.

Oddly, here where I live, the economy is not doing particularly badly. I recently met with the accountant who has done our taxes for years and she said that the clients she was seeing all were doing ok right now. Not that she was cheery about everything. Not everything is exactly as it is being reported.