Heating fuel types?

OK, so when a house is offered for sale and they say heat is by "solid fuel" should I assume that would be....firewood? Coal? Ehhh?  Multi-fuel would be.....what? (They never actually state.)

And is "hot water by immersion heater" the same as a hot water heater is in the USA? (The big tank.)

Solid fuel usually means smokeless coal or similar.

Immersion heater is a hot water tank heated with an electric element.

Solid fuel usually means smokeless coal or similar.

Immersion heater is a hot water tank heated with an electric element.

They still sell coal? Really?

And is "hot water by immersion heater" the same as a hot water heater is in the USA? (The big tank.)

Yes, coal is still sold.   Nothing beats a coal fire in a pub on a cold day!

The immersion heater is electric... think of your big water tank with an electric element in it, like a kettle, to heat the water.  ££££££

They still sell coal? Really?

When we sold my Dad's house in 2010 coal fired central heating was common in the area he lived, and he had had a new back boiler installed just a couple of years earlier.

In 2013 we had a vacation in a cottage in Ireland (Donegal) and that was also a coal fire with back boiler that supplied the hot water for the radiators. Although it was May it was wet and bitterly cold, and we used it every day. Having grown up with coal fires it was nostalgic to begin with but soon grew old humping bags of logs and sacks of coal, plus cleaning and disposing of the ash every day.

Yeah, when I was a child my grandmother had an old farmhouse that had a coal/water radiator heating system. And a separate little coal furnace for hot water. She had to go down to the basement several times a day to shovel more coal on it. The basement had a large ante-room where a couple of times a year the coal truck would come and chute coal down into it through a window. Noisy! My granny used to have to haul the coal ash out periodically and would spread it on the  ruts in the lawn that made up the driveway. That used to compact down pretty impressively.

Anyway, not something I want to deal with as I'm getting older. And the immersion heater would have to be replaced with an on-demand. (I'm a cheapskate.)  But it is interesting to see that there are still homes heated by coal. I guess it's imported coal now?