I don't know if it's me or not, but the brick furnace takes almost 2 entire pieces of coal, to smelt a single item. it's literally BURNING fuel. compared to a stone furnace it's almost 20x more wasteful on fuel. Was this intended, as I feel it was not.
as another note, the pollution for one furnace is WAY high (13.5x higher than that of stone!!)
This leads to me not wanting to use such an early game furnace, I have red pollution density due to just 20 of these! as well as my fuel is just being consumed like a black hole.
I'd love for it to not do these things, or at least be a bit more balanced!

I think it might be a typo, the furnace uses 1800kw of power, at 200% efficiency, which comes out to 10x as much power usage, for 1.7x faster smelting. One piece of coal is worth 4000kw, which lasts a lot longer at 90kw power usage, that of a normal furnace.

I love the speed, but for that ratio (I know it's an early game alternative) it's a bad option as 10 furnaces not only out do it, it also produces less pollution. I only noted it due to know pollution changed in 17, and it might not have been noticed in the files upon updating