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I remember incinerators. Well, just one, actually. My dad was a holdout on getting a gas forced-air furnace, so until I was about 7 or 8 years old our house was heated by a coal incinerator in the basement. My older brother was tasked with shoveling coal; what an awful job. A coal truck would come once a month in winter and dump coal into a chute which led to a large bin in our basement. It was messy and dusty. Worst of all, we breathed that coal dust 24/7/365. The coal-laden air left blackish marks on the heating grates and on the walls above the grates. A few times a year, we had a family cleaning day, and one of my jobs was to scrub the coal marks off the grates and walls.
I remember the "clinkers" that formed in the bottom of the incinerator and that I brought one to my second-grade class for Show and Tell.
We were so thrilled when Dad finally caved and bought a "real" furnace like those that everyone else in the neighborhood had.
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Our house in Alliance, Ohio had a coal furnace. The basement was divided into 2 parts. One part just for the furnace and coal supply. When my parents replaced the coal furnace with a gas furnace, the basement had a lot more usable space. We moved to Hartville, Ohio to a house with an oil furnace and incinerator. My parents replaced the oil furnace with a gas furnace. The incinerator was converted to gas. I'm sure the incinerator created less pollution than a burn barrel.
Our house in Alliance, Ohio had a coal furnace. The basement was divided into 2 parts. One part just for the furnace and coal supply. When my parents replaced the coal furnace with a gas furnace, the basement had a lot more usable space. We moved to Hartville, Ohio to a house with an oil furnace and incinerator. My parents replaced the oil furnace with a gas furnace. The incinerator was converted to gas. I'm sure the incinerator created less pollution than a burn barrel.
It's so weird to me that gas only came to my hometown a couple years before i was born. Every house and building in town still had coal chutes, but all the furnaces were gas by that time. I was told that they were coal chutes, otherwise i would have never known what they were for.
We did still burn our trash in an incinerator. My dad would then shovel the ash into trash cans to be picked up. But that all stopped when the city trash truck caught fire and burned up. After they replaced the truck, they refused to pick up ashes anymore. So my dad hired two guys with a dump truck to clean the remainder of the ash out. That was the last time the incinerator was used.
It's so weird to me that gas only came to my hometown a couple years before i was born. Every house and building in town still had coal chutes, but all the furnaces were gas by that time. I was told that they were coal chutes, otherwise i would have never known what they were for.
We did still burn our trash in an incinerator. My dad would then shovel the ash into trash cans to be picked up. But that all stopped when the city trash truck caught fire and burned up. After they replaced the truck, they refused to pick up ashes anymore. So my dad hired two guys with a dump truck to clean the remainder of the ash out. That was the last time the incinerator was used.
I was on the committee that studied gas conversion for our HOA. We are on oil. Initially I favored conversion but when the upfront cost for the piping and furnace leaped from $15,000 to $22,000 in a short period, I felt we were being gouged. More importantly, I was send, about 50 years old. I did not see any way that I would advertise the cost over the 40 or so years that I have likely to remain. Apparently others felt the same way because the project never happened. Are utility needed, if I remember correctly, 150 out of the 250 units to convert, but even that number kept on changing.
I'm so old I remember when they use Aluminum for the top of the Washington Monument, because it was way more valuable than gold. I got to actually see it in 1934 while examining the lighting rods that are up there. They are gold-plated, and platinum-tipped lightning rods. The aluminum pyramid was doing just fine.
However, I don't even know if the lightning rods are still there now.
Spoiler
I'm joking, I'm not really 189 years old
Was wondering who you were. I thought that I, at 88, was the oldest one on CD.
Yep, Tammy, I also remember the clinkers, coal trucks and chutes. My mom had to go down to the basement of our apartment and shovel the coal into the furnace. (Dad was in England WWII)
How I dreaded those cleaning days with a bucket of Spick and Span.
We had a coal furnace, too. The coal room, bin, took up only about 20% of the cellar. The furnace was about ten feet away. Dad paid an ash man, it was a thing, to haul it off. Mom or dad may have thrown something other than coal in there every once in a while, but we didn't use it as an incinerator.
We burned Anthracite coal in Northeastern Pennsylvania. It's pretty clean. We had radiators so no vent cleaning.
Remember "Kings X"? That bit of magic of crossing your fingers and you were immune from being caught and then being "it" in a game of tag?
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