Pcitures

Hans,
Haman's certainly burn faster along the front edge. At times, I may aim my shovel across the front to repack this area in the stove. When shaking, you will notice hot & possibly unburnt coal drop from this area. This is a problem with Harman hand fired units. I have the SF250. I keep my unit reduced to 50% until later in Dec. By doing this can build a wall using a plate & firebrick. This works really well in MY application.

But to answer your last question, a new coal fire in a hand fired is always the hottest. The first 12-15 hrs. After that, the tenps will drop simply cause you have some ash buildup which you can never get into the pan without losing good coal. You original picture looked like you were only burning 50% of the coal. remember, you can not burn top down, only bottom up.

A few images:

Hi Cap,

Thanks! I do feel like I'm not getting a full burn all the time, the other night it was amazingly warm and I had a full burn because as you said, I aimed a shovel full to the front and it got it going really well. I was thinking about adding a plate or bricks across the front so that I can build a deeper bed of coals there? What do you think? If I use a brick I'm only losing 1" or so of overall stove depth, but gaining a couple inches of bed? Would that make sense?

Right now I have a fire going about 70% of yous, but not as many flames, but still running hot at 500. I didn't do anything different than I have been and with 1.25 turns on the spinner I'm running at 500 on the stove and have been since 8:30AM. Things just seem a bit all over the place at the moment and I'm not sure why. The draft is the same, the load process is the same, the shake is the same. The only thing I am trying to do is put more coal towards the front, would that make that much of a difference? 100 on the stove and 10 in the room?? Again, that increase only started after starting this thread, before it was all over the board with no rationale that I could figure out.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I have been burning well for a couple of weeks but as it has become colder, I wanted more heat out of the Glacier Bay even though it was reading 500* on the front. I read some more info on this forum... I found I had my baro set for a .06 setting on my manometer and lowered it to .04 and now the stove is keeping my 2200sq.ft. house 75*(a little cooler on the second floor but good for sleeping). The stove is in the unfinished, stone walled, basement. When the baro was set at .06, to get the stove to read 500*, I had the underfire draft open 2 1/2 turns. Now the baro is set for .04, I get 500* with 1 1/2 turns open... big difference. As stated, the small difference in the stack draft made the stove require less underfire draft to get the same temp and more heat inside the house.