Living in PA, I burn coal. Stoker-fed unit (the ONLY way to go) burning rice coal. I love this thing. :biggrinbounce2:
I've used nat gas, oil, wood and coal over the years. Coal is the cheapest $ per BTU. Nat gas is the easiest but most expensive. Wood is cheaper if you cut yourself but the time is the killer there.
The dust is a problem, as ansehnlich1 says. The only place I really have this problem is in the hopper feed. When I moved in, there was no door. I put in a simple plywood door and plumbed in an exhaust fan with a switch that turns it on whenever the door is opened (closet light switch). This puts enough backpressure so when I rake down the coal to the screw I get virtually no dust into the room. And I really can't see any "smudges" on the brick outside either.
Emptying the ashes is the only "unsolvable" problem. You could build a huge pit and have outside access to empty it. This would be IDEAL for new construction but it's too late for me. I get a bucket a day in the winter and (I use this to do my hot water year round about every 3-4 days in the summer. If you're careful, don't get an overflow and don't bang into things, you can pull the bucket and put a new one in without making any dust. If the bucket overflows, you're going to need a little scoop shovel and shop vac to clean up. What you do is turn on the shop vac and use it to grab as much of the dust cloud as possible while you scoop and place (don't drop, just makes more dust) the scoops in the bucket.
I have maybe 1/3 mile driveway that has maybe 80 feet of slope so I keep a few 55 gallon barrels full of ashes for ice. The rest of the ashes get dumped into a couple piles and spread out in a little parking lot. If I didn't have the land to dump the ashes, that would be something else to think about. No grass or wees grow through the coal ashes but I don't know of anythign toxic in the ashes, ph is probably too acid for growth.
As stated above, coal burns fine in the summer, you just need to change the feed (coal and air) and creamer settings. In the winter, you need a higher feed rate since the output demand is higher for water and heat than water alone. And since the heat is aways getting kicked on, the creamer can be set longer. In the summer, you don't need as much output to just do the water but the creamer needs to kick on more often so the fire doesn't go out.
Regardless of what you burn, you need a CO detector. If you lose the fire with coal though, you'll smell it soon enough.
I clean the chimney out myself every year but don't really need to since it's pretty clean. triple-wall stainless, no problems. do "oils" in the coal so no creosote.
Things to keep handy: mapp gas cylinder for relights, a pair of insulating gloves to pull the buckets out, can of oil to lube the reciprocating gears if you have a stoker-fed unit, a rake to rake down the pile to the screw feed, a little shovel and shop vac for cleanups.
I heat the garage with wood and I think it's dirtier than the coal but then I don't use a shopvac out there when shovelling ashes out and they go everywhere. If I used a vac, it would probably be about the same...
Here's the obligatory picture of the beast. Needs a cleaning, that's for sure. Note that it's just regular dust on top, not coal dust.
Wooo-hoooo, post #500!