I have been offered a French stove that looks like a wood burner but is supposed to burn coal as it has a grate, can that be right?
A – yes it’s possible, we call them hybrid stoves as they originated as traditional wood burners but were either re-modelled by the factory to burn all solid fuels or designed to look like a traditional wood burner but capable of burning coal & coke too. They will have a suspended grate and usually a set of cast iron liners, plus will weigh substantially more than a wood burner of a similar size. They are also fairly rare. Sometimes the added internals were removed to allow for larger logs to be burnt, but at that point it becomes a wood only burner.
