The Old Coal Furnace

      When we turned on the furnace this year, it was simple. A motor in the basement responded to the twist of a knob upstairs and the furnace started its job. It wasn't always so easy to start a home-heating season.

       Until I was ten, my family lived at 1101 Hertel Avenue in Buffalo, in one of three houses between 2 parking lots. Each had a basement, a first and second floor apartment, and an attic. 

     Our house was covered with brown, fake bricks. We lived on the first floor and rented the second floor. Our attic was a dusty place for storage of boxes and buzzing flies, heavy on the flies and our basement was for the furnaces.

     The basement was a dusty, gloomy, growling place, best entered quickly and left soon, little feet banging up the stairs. The dark area behind the stairs was of special concern. Impossible to see, it was a place for monsters.

     In the center of the basement the furnaces stood: likely not as large as in my memory but big.   

     They were clanging fire pits with octopi arms. I remember taking laundry to the basement. Walking down the stairs with the basket that was almost as big as me, charging past the furnaces, dumping the clothes by the washer and rushing up the stairs as fast as I could pulling the door shut behind me. 

      There were two rumbling coal furnaces, one for each apartment. They were round cast-iron fire bellies with white pipe-arms. In the summer, they were quiet and empty but, in the winter, they came alive with red flames glowing behind teeth-like grates. The fire hissed and popped while the fan growled in its cave. At my age, fear was reasonable.

     Having a coal furnace was trouble. The coal truck would back up to a basement window and send coal pounding down a chute through a window into the coal bin, a small room caked in soot. Slats of wood slid into place across the doorway serving as a closed door in preparation for the delivery.    

     The coal would bounce and thump against the wooden sides of the room and the slats until the level inside reached the height of the window. 

      When the bin was full, the shovel had to be lifted shoulder high, above the top slat to get coal. As the level of the coal went down, the slats were removed. After weeks of shoveling, the whole doorway was open, and one entered the dusty room to fetch coal.    

     Coal shovels were big, coal was heavy, and the dust was constant. Our coal furnace was superior to some heating systems, but the word automatic was years away.

        During the winter, my parents would go into the basement every morning and evening to shovel coal into the mouth of the furnace. When the weather was colder, the shoveling happened more often.  

     All that coal created ashes and that was another job. Ashes fell through grates in the furnace's belly. Collected in metal bushels, they were carried to the curbside on garbage day. Ashes were supposed to be cold before being put out for collection and that either took a long time or the addition of water, making the dense ash even heavier.   

     If the ashes were hot, the trash workers left them, telling the whole neighborhood that this was a careless house.

     As time went on, people in our neighborhood took advantage of the opportunity to convert a coal furnace to gas and there were fewer and fewer tubs of ashes at the curbs. Finally, my parents decided that they could afford the luxury of gas heat.  

     This was wonderful. A gas furnace could seem almost friendly. While outwardly the furnace was the same huge, multi-armed monster, the gas flames were quiet, well-behaved dancers and their blowers hummed gently. What a relief. With the new furnace, I had only to worry about the monster behind the stairs.  

          Rick said that he was perhaps fortunate to have a coal furnace with an auger system. This auger was about 4 feet long with a drill bit like thing that was 6 inches in diameter. 

     An auger is a mechanical device that would feed lumps of coal into the furnace automatically.

     Coal was shoveled into a box sort of container, called a hopper. The auger attached to the bottom of the hopper and moved lumps of coal over to the business part of the furnace.

     Coal had to be shoveled into the hopper, but the system certainly generated less dust by keeping the coal contained.

     It wasn't perfect because sometimes the auger would get jammed up. The person filling the hopper had to be aware of what was on the shovel because if a too-large chunk of coal went into the hopper, it could get stuck or break something called a sheer pin. In the same way a load of coal might contain the occasional rock which is harder than coal or there might be a piece of coal with rock stuck to it. 

    The point is that bigger lumps or harder lumps would break the mechanism and make it necessary to empty the hopper so that someone could fix it and put it all back together again.

     Rick said that in his house, he was often the "someone" who would have to repair the auger.

     There was a multi armed basement monster in the Riverside house but it was exorcised before our children could feel any fear. It was a coal conversion that had a 30" pilot light that made it look like a crematorium.