Concerning Coal

Our apartment here, in Berlin, is furnished with several stoves for heating. There are three little stoves, which are brown and around three feet tall, two Kachelöfen (tiled ovens), which store heat well and are almost six feet tall, and one white stove in the kitchen, which looks like a very old-fashioned cooking stove or oven. Our Kachelöfen look about like the one in the following photo from RümpelRasch, except that ours are white.


We are using coal as fuel, which is a new experience for me. We had mostly electric heating in Canada, and the one stove we did have was a wood stove. Accordingly, it was a bit of a surprise to see piles of plasticky black bricks in the hallway. (Mind you, the first delivery of coal arrived in October, so this post is more than a little belated.)




The briquettes in the photos don't look black, I know. The lighting was bad, so I used flash. :o/

The coal is called Braunkohle (literally, brown coal) in German, which translates to lignite (or, possibly, bituminous coal — I really can't tell one from the other).

---

Note: The above photos were edited using Adobe Photoshop.