Smaller & Hotter

The old-fashioned furnace may be bound for the postwar ash heap. Cheap new miniature house heaters have recently been announced by the soft-coal industry and an auto-heater manufacturer. This week the anthracite industry joined in with a pint-sized burner of its own.

Hard Coal. The heater designed by Anthracite Industries, Inc. (not yet tested in a house) is a steel pipe 18 inches long and four to six inches in diameter (four inches for a four-room house, six inches for eight rooms). It has a feeder which pushes coal in at one end and ashes out at the other, a water jacket, a small pump which circulates the heated water rapidly to radiators. (The unit can also be adapted to hot air or steam.) In its tiny fire bed, coal burns much faster than in" previous furnaces, but so efficiently that the burner produces 40% more heat per unit of coal.

Its designers claim that the heater will cost much less and be cheaper to run than other automatic furnaces now on the market.* It needs only a small vent (instead of a full-size chimney), can be installed virtually anywhere in the house.

Soft Coal. The Bituminous Coal Institute beat the anthracite group to press with a "bungalow furnace" which it said would sell for about $60 and save 30% on coal bills.

Already tested, this stove is a box three feet high and two feet square, capable of heating a four-or five-room house (if the circulation of heat takes care of itself). Using new types of air jets and flues, it burns soft coal, eats its own smoke, runs three days without stoking. Twenty-seven stove manufacturers expect to market it before war's end.

Hot Air. Stewart-Warner Corp. has developed a gasoline-burner the size of a waste basket, capable of generating enough heat for a 20-room house. Based on the hot-air heater now used in planes, the unit can be hung from attic rafters, with a blower to distribute the hot air by means of ducts in the walls and registers in each room. Stewart-Warner has not announced the cost of such a central heater but estimates that a one-room unit will cost $20 to $30. It also estimates that fuel costs will be no higher than those of the oldfashioned furnace. The company also plans to adapt the burner for fuel oil and natural gas.

* The new heater is not to be confused with the anthracite-burning Swedish "Aga" stove which, operating on a different principle, burns only 8 Ibs. of coal a day, but is much more expensive ($300 to $600), is used only as a kitchen range.

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