Monday, October 11, 2010

Coal Bunker

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Well it’s not exactly a bunker, in fact it’s a gaylord from work, one of two given to me by my boss. But it serves my purposes; it will hold coal (and quite a bit of it) and with the skid underneath will keep it dry even if my basement floods again!

I’m somewhat excited about this, as it allows me to finally buy coal in bulk (instead of by the bag, which adds over $8o per ton to the price!).

I may need to “notch” either the front or the side of the gaylord to easily reach the coal once the level gets low (trust me, it’s no fun leaning into one of these), but for the short term I plan in leaving it as-is.

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Here is an image of the material tag on the side; the reason I’m posting this is to show that it holds 1,100 pounds of Valox (glass-filled polyester) (and for those of you who don’t know SABIC is the successor to the now defunct General Electric Plastics Division). I’m at least reasonably sure that hard coal is more dense than glass-filled PBT, so as per my experiance only one to one and a half fills should cover this next winter.

It’s not visable in the picture, but I positioned the gaylord directly under one of my basement windows, so I can shovel the coal directly out of my truck into it. It’s not what I planned to use, but it’s a LOT better than what I had until now!!!