SIR, Mr. John Fox's letter in your issue of July
9 sets out many of the desirables in the present situation, but does not mention how official propaganda on the one hand and official practice on the other seem to be in conflict.
Much lip service is paid to the desirability of installing modern combustion devices to extract the maximum heat from the available fuel and also to the desirability of burning smokeless fuels and I think it must be agreed that it would be hard to deny the validity of either of these ideas. However, once one has gone to the expense of installing a modern heat storage cooker (an Aga for example, of which I am a satisfied user) the National Coal Board appears to assume that you arc fair game. My latest delivery of fuel for the Aga cost nearer £11 than 10 guineas a ton and yet I understand that it is no more than hriquettcd coal dust that has been carbonised. Not only is a penal price extracted from the consumer, who has got to have a suitable fuel from a rather limited range of choice, but I understand also that the coal merchant is equally roughly treated in that his margin of profit on such lines is considerably lower than on ordinary house coal. nition is taken of one's natural reluctance to cast that apparatus aside, and so, as far as I can make out, one pays in a year as much for the reduced quantity of fuel consumed by one of these modern efficient devices as one would do in buying twice the quantity of ordinary house coal that is consumed by one of the out-of-date and allegedly undesir- able devices. Just to make matters worse those with Aga and similar cookers often have extreme difficulty in acquiring the right kind of fuel, which is hardly the kind of encouragement that reinforces official exhor- tation.—Yours faithfully,
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