I picked up the free RCA

[electra225]

There wasn't a structure on the planet as warm and inviting as that old house I was raised in, originally an old summer kitchen that grandpa and Uncle Fort was given and pulled it with a horse-drawn rigging to where it sat when I was a kid. It had been added onto several times. They put an upstairs on it, uninsulated and so drafty snow would be on the foot of my bed if the wind was out of the west. The bottom part of the house was insulated with sawdust, a termite's paradise, I suspect, although, knowing Uncle Fort, he gave the sawdust a good squirt of Chlordane when he put in the sawdust. It had a hand-dug basement with field stones for a wall, then mortored. The floor was dirt until we got indoor plumbing. There was a huge register above the furnace that made huge amounts of heat. Grandma usually had a fan running to use as a blower for the furnace....

[Motorola minion]

Nice to read everyone's coal experience. I grew up in the post-coal era, after practically everyone converted to oil or electric.

The first home I bought had a giant, round Williamson coal furnace, abandoned in place with the coal bin next to it, but actually heated with a gas boiler the size of a 2-drawer filing cabinet

Moving 8 years later into an 1867 frame (with only attic floor insulation!) farmhouse with oil-fired Weil-McLain boiler made it mandatory to plan an alternate heat source soon after moving here 1997, oil was cheap and the baseboard hydronic fin-tube coverage provided nice even heat so your feet were never cold. Still, coal seemed a good choice for this.

The Harmon Mark II coal stove we got the next year would go into the largest first floor room where a "heatrola" once sat. After 10 years, I would install an outdoor firewood boiler and sell the Harmon due to a more pressing need to clean up our indoor air.

I will always miss that warmth felt in the furthest corners of even the upstairs, which thankfully never got to warm due to thick plaster walls and undersized registers to allow heat up to second floor. I spent much time in front of the unit, right in our living room and fell asleep many times, waking to a gentle fan noise and amber glow of nut-sized coal. The next morning, I could toss some locust oak or cherry firewood on top of the nearly out coal fire and get even more heat by tending it all day, carefully setting draft while doing so.

I would get a ton of nut or stove size delivered for $125 and stored it under the back porch, filling the hod up each night before going to bed. It was a continuous operation, carrying coal and wood in, removing ashes and the extra vacuuming necessary. The biggest part I do not miss is getting the flue cleaned every year, dealing with various chimney sweeps that never resembled Dick Van Dyke. I figured from 10 years of barely using oil, we saved $1500 at least every winter.

[TC Chris]

This fun, even if we did hijack the thread. My brother lived in Canada for a while. In one of the cities he rented a ca. 1920 Craftsman house. The attic was insulated with 4' of moss.

I spent a year in TN as a VISTA (1970). We were directed to live in the area where we worked, so two of us rented a house in a poor neighborhood. It had no heat so we went around begging churches and charities for appliances. One gave us a Warm Morning gas heater, one of those with the ceramic plates behind glass panes. The flue was in the kitchen, the central room, so the stove went there. Heat did not exactly flow quickly to other rooms, so we found small fans and mounted them in the upper corners of door frames to spread it around.

Now I've got a tiny gas boiler, about the size of a large suitcase, with a fan-assisted exhaust flue. It runs hot water through baseboard radiators, the 2nd-best mode of heating there is (best would be in-floor radiant heat).

Chris Campbell

[19&41]

When I was in basic training at Ft. Knox, KY in 1974, we had the old wooden barracks of the style Ernie Bilko lived in. They had coal fired heat and water heat. I always wondered who maintained them and kept them full. I know they were coal fired because they smelled like grandpa's house when the chimineys were smokin'.

[hermitcrab]

I was just looking at your photos again. One shows the power amp/power supply in the upper left the image. RCA mounted it so the tubes are UNDER the filter caps and maybe an OPT, so the tubes will tend to cook those components. I've always wondered why the companies did not take more care about heat management. It's not really a bean counter issue because orientation in most cases does not have any significant cost effect. A thoughtful engineer could have placed the amp so it did not cook itself, giving his company a chance at a better reputation for durability.

Chris Campbell

I have read on other forums that the heat of the tubes will permeate up and cause the plastic tone arms to warp over time as well?...