Too Many Fines in Your Coal ?

Tired of dealing with what you think is too many fines in your coal ?

I came across these pictures and reshot them with the digital. They are from 20 years ago when I was building a radiant heat slab for the front section of my shop.

This section of the building is 24 x 34 and had been a carriage house and furniture shop - built sometime in the 1890's.

When we broke up the 2 inch thick concrete slab there was an average of one foot deep of coal fines under it that they had used as fill. You can see by the space under the bottom edge of the stairs where the floor level was before we started. That's a car jack stand under one of the 4x4 stair posts.

These pix were taken on day two of shoveling coal fines into a contractor wheel barrow to take out and dump.

This is what can happen when you buy a house that used to belong to the local coal dealers.

Paul

Those fines probably work every bit as good as pea stone.
Thrifty.

Was a bit too slippery to make a good base like sand or stone. The slab had a lot of cracks were cars had been parked on it and it had settled as the fines shifted.

The local old timers guessed the fines were from what got cleaned out of the bottoms of the coal silos that used to be across the road. Before the days of pea and rice burning stoves those fines were of not much value.

They also dumped some of their trash in as part of the fill. There were a lot of old glass bottles dumped in piles, mixed in with the fines.

And we found a lady's Victorian era high button shoe. .... luckily, with no skeleton !

Paul