How "Low" Can You Go? (Pix)

 
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joeq
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Post by joeq » Sat. Feb. 23, 2013 5:53 pm

That's not a bad idea FB. (the hopper mod). My parts stove hopper was burned so bad, the leading edge of the bottom is completely gone to the point it's curved and raised....quite a bit. It wouldn't bother me to take a mason blade to it and chop off the bottom . I mentioned my Video order? well, it arrived today, and it was relatively informative. Geared towards the Surdiac stoves, but had some basic theory. It wasn't a promo from the manufacturer like I expected, but an amateur video from an owner of a furniture co. that sells and supplies parts for Surdiacs (and possibly other) coal stoves. There were a couple areas where I was hoping I assembled some pieces wrong, but unfortunately didn't turn out to be. He referenced,(as you asked) about different height settings for the hopper, and recommended the hopper being set on the highest setting. (2 options). Says the burn times will be longer at the higher setting, (as you mentioned). Excited not knowing about the "2" settings, I rushed to my stove...only to find I already set it there. :(
He also stated the stove, (he was actually displaying a slightly larger model stove than mine) should be able to burn approx. 8 -12hrs w/o "tending" (what-ever that means), and as high as 20-24 on a very low setting. :| I will admit, with my MPD totally shut, the stove does appear to be running longer. today I awoke to a brighter than average coal bed, even tho it was only about 5 hrs after it was scraped.
The last thing interesting on the video was his explanation of the baro "and" an MPD. He had both installed in his "fireplace" installation, and basically used the MPD to make his adjustment to his baro setting of .04. Says that's where these stoves should operate at. the baro does nothing more than equalize the draft, if the wind changes, but the MPD sets the draft where you want it.
That's all for now. got to "tend" to the stove.


 
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MarkV
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Post by MarkV » Sun. Feb. 24, 2013 12:17 am

Wow, joeq, I thought my Franco had a shallow firebox, but looking at the pic of your grates, it seems like the Surdiac is even shallower. No wonder you can't keep it burning that long (and still putting out decent heat).

 
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joeq
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Post by joeq » Sun. Feb. 24, 2013 11:54 am

Well Mark V, (any relation to a BBC?), did you have your Franco very long? I'm not familiar with the amount of hopper fed stoves out there, but from what I understood, the Surdiacs were a popular stove in their day. I wasn't aware there were so many models and styles. I'm not sure sure how to categorize coal stoves, but I'm thinking there are larger styles intended to be primary heat sources for an entire house, and at the other extreme, stoves built to heat smaller areas. I can't see using coal as a medium for "weekend burning only", considering how difficult coal is to light. Are there any hopper fed stoves that will heat a small house,(1000-2000 sq/ft), yet provide long burn times w/o any tending for over approx 12 hrs? And what is the benefit of a hopper anyway, if they sacrifice on coal bed space?

 
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Post by franco b » Mon. Feb. 25, 2013 12:19 am

joeq wrote:Are there any hopper fed stoves that will heat a small house,(1000-2000 sq/ft), yet provide long burn times w/o any tending for over approx 12 hrs? And what is the benefit of a hopper anyway, if they sacrifice on coal bed space?
The Hitzer stoves will do as you want. So will Harman or many antique stoves but most will lack thermostat and hopper or magazine.

The hopper does not sacrifice fire pot space when the fire pot is deeper. The purpose of the hopper is to feed preheated coal to the fire which lessens recovery time and will also feed a bit of coal between shakes. Users who have gone from a batch fed stove to one with a hopper are usually enthusiastic in liking it.

Running your stove at a lower firing rate like 25 or 30 pounds per day will give you longer tending intervals. You could also consider installing a second stove and run both at a lower firing rate. You could also get the larger Surdiac. As a second stove I am running the mid size Franco Belge which is smaller than yours and have just gone 14 hours between shakes (20 pounds per day) and could have gone further easily. The stove has been altered though to have a deeper fire bed which is easy to do on this stove. At higher firing rates I have to shake every 8 hours. The full size Franco Belge can burn 40 to 50 pounds with 8 hour tending intervals.

 
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Post by lobsterman » Mon. Feb. 25, 2013 7:59 am

With the coldest of the New England winter behind us, I am too going to longer burn times and one shake a day with temps in the mid 30s. To hold the fire for an extended period, just close the primaries completely (the MPD is always closed except for loading) but leave the air vents over the coal bed open. As William notes the stove will stay lit for a very long time, 2 days easy on a full load, liking a temperature of about 190. The coal burns to a fine ash. If you push this to the limit of no return, it is best to add coal before shaking to not dump the last of the fire. Opening her up wide (base heater off, MPD open, primaries open, air over coal closed) brings her up remarkably quickly. You can hear the coal crackling within seconds. I remember being impressed when seeing this on one of William's old classic videos. In short order, the rising room temps will remind you to close her down. Then comes the best part: the ever-lasting extra heat output that comes from the base heater mode and natural convection. Efficiency! Sorry if you are tired of hearing about it, but we love our old base heaters.

PS This is what she looks like this morning after an 18 hour burn on medium low with primaries 1/8 inch open, starting with the coal heaped up. I have not touched the fire and the blue flames tell me there is lots of life left. The stove is at 350, a good match to the 32 degree outside temperature and I can now close off the primary as the day warms up and will not need to shake until this evening. Probably burning at around 20 pounds per day. Buying Santa Claus coal now.
coal.JPG
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Post by joeq » Mon. Feb. 25, 2013 4:45 pm

franco b wrote:
Running your stove at a lower firing rate like 25 or 30 pounds per day will give you longer tending intervals. .
I'm running my stove as low as possible FB. I've closed my MPD all the way to achieve a .04 draft, and my thermostat is on fractions right now. I have gained some headway with burn time since I've been shutting my MPD totally. But not as much as I'ld like.

 
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Post by joeq » Mon. Feb. 25, 2013 4:47 pm

[quote="lobsterman"] Sorry if you are tired of hearing about it, but we love our old base heaters.
PS This is what she looks like this morning after an 18 hour

Someday, lobsterman, I'll find a beauty like your older stoves :D


 
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Post by MarkV » Mon. Feb. 25, 2013 8:23 pm

joeq wrote:Well Mark V, (any relation to a BBC?), did you have your Franco very long?
My older brother, who's been tearing down motors since he was about 14, would have gotten the BBC thing right away. Me, I had to look it up. :funny: My brother’s done several frame-up restorations, including a beautiful turquoise '66 GTO with three deuces. It wound up going across the stage at Barrett Jackson, a few years after he sold it to a collector.

He's working on a late 60's (I think) Chevy Nova SS wagon now. That's gonna be cool. I keep trying to talk him into restoring a '63 T-bird drop top (red with white top and interior, wire wheels, dual antennas on the rear fenders--that's my dream car), so he can sell it to me when he gets tired of it. But he never listens. :(

Yeah, I had two Francos for a total of 28 years. Got my first in '84 when we built our house. Didn't intend it to heat the whole house, just supplement the heat pump, keep the backup heat from running, and keep the basement warm--which it did nicely. Again, most heat output would be first 4-5 hours, then a gradual falloff after that. 8-10 hours in, it wasn't putting out much heat. However, I think because of the slightly deeper firebox compared to yours, I wasn't usually at risk of losing the fire until 12-14 hours. Depended a lot on the coal, though. I usually burned red ash nut, and last year my local coal yard sold me a batch of garbage red ash--I often had nearly-dead fires after only 8-9 hours. Sometimes I could save it, sometimes I couldn't. Never had such a mess.

Franco radiant stoves came in two basic models--a small one, and a larger one like I had--similar to your Surdiac judging from your pictures. Internally, I don't think F-B changed the design of their stoves in at least 30 years. After years of tinkering with dampers, draft, thermostat settings, etc. I got nothing better than I described above.
joeq wrote: I'm not familiar with the amount of hopper fed stoves out there, but from what I understood, the Surdiacs were a popular stove in their day. I wasn't aware there were so many models and styles. I'm not sure sure how to categorize coal stoves, but I'm thinking there are larger styles intended to be primary heat sources for an entire house, and at the other extreme, stoves built to heat smaller areas. I can't see using coal as a medium for "weekend burning only", considering how difficult coal is to light. Are there any hopper fed stoves that will heat a small house,(1000-2000 sq/ft), yet provide long burn times w/o any tending for over approx 12 hrs? And what is the benefit of a hopper anyway, if they sacrifice on coal bed space?
Based on my "vast experience" of five weeks burning a DS Machine 1500, rated at 96,000 BTUs, I can definitely say yes, there are stoves that can serve as a primary heat source for a home. If my setup was better--chimney and stove near center of house instead of at one end--I could come close to heating my place completely with the DS. Some of the larger DS Machine and Hitzer models, based on their specs, could certainly heat a home larger than mine (2250 sf on two floor, plus another 800 sf of basement). Obviously, the home must be well-insulated, and set up to circulate the heat from the stove through the house to get the best result. There are a bunch of threads on here addressing that.

After the F-B, the DS 1500 firebox seemed scary big when I first lit it. But the square firebox, with its area and depth, easily provides 24-hour burns. When it's very cold--low teens or single digits--I shake every 12 hours to keep it a little hotter, but it would go 24 hrs even then. With temps like today, I have the thermo turned back, and the stove's going 24 hours without attention--keeps the whole house comfy, and my heat pump hasn't kicked on once today. That is sweet.

Re. the hopper...in the DS 1500 it feeds down onto the center of the fire, and holds a full 30-pound bucket of coal. The obvious benefit is to gradually let some new coal onto the fire as it "drops" when the coals are turning into ash--keeping the fire hot, giving a longer burn, and making tending less frequent. Unlike my F-B, which seemed to only feed coal when I shook it, the DS hopper does this effectively--If I check the hopper after it's been burning 12-15 hours, you can see the coal has dropped about 3-4 inches from the top of the hopper.

The other benefit of the hopper, as Franco B pointed out, is you’re feeding preheated coal onto the fire—like 400-500 degrees, as opposed to room temperature. Before I fired my DS 1500 the first time, I was freaked out by all the posts on here about puffbacks and explosions. Never had anything like that with the Franco, and I thought simply having a much bigger firebox would cause that. I think many of the stoves that do that, though, tend to be non-hopper hand-feds, so any new coal is going in at room temp. If you combine that with a 24-hour shakedown, I’d assume there’s much more time for volatiles to build up without the benefit of the “blues” starting up again to ignite them. Hence more chance of puffback.

In the DS, even at a 24-hour shaking, it recovers enough to get the blues going in just a few minutes. I’m careful to leave the ash door open a few minutes before shaking, so there’s plenty of hot coals waiting to reignite the volatiles. But the prewarmed coal definitely helps speed things along.

Sorry for the long response...unlike most others on here, I really can go on and on about burning coal. ;)

 
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Post by wsherrick » Mon. Feb. 25, 2013 10:38 pm

lobsterman wrote:With the coldest of the New England winter behind us, I am too going to longer burn times and one shake a day with temps in the mid 30s. To hold the fire for an extended period, just close the primaries completely (the MPD is always closed except for loading) but leave the air vents over the coal bed open. As William notes the stove will stay lit for a very long time, 2 days easy on a full load, liking a temperature of about 190. The coal burns to a fine ash. If you push this to the limit of no return, it is best to add coal before shaking to not dump the last of the fire. Opening her up wide (base heater off, MPD open, primaries open, air over coal closed) brings her up remarkably quickly. You can hear the coal crackling within seconds. I remember being impressed when seeing this on one of William's old classic videos. In short order, the rising room temps will remind you to close her down. Then comes the best part: the ever-lasting extra heat output that comes from the base heater mode and natural convection. Efficiency! Sorry if you are tired of hearing about it, but we love our old base heaters.

PS This is what she looks like this morning after an 18 hour burn on medium low with primaries 1/8 inch open, starting with the coal heaped up. I have not touched the fire and the blue flames tell me there is lots of life left. The stove is at 350, a good match to the 32 degree outside temperature and I can now close off the primary as the day warms up and will not need to shake until this evening. Probably burning at around 20 pounds per day. Buying Santa Claus coal now.
coal.JPG
Never get tired of hearing it. There's nothing like these things and and I'm glad others are now finding out for themselves. Coal Stove Easy Street is a great place to live and we aren't stingy about it. We want to share it with everybody else.

 
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Post by MarkV » Mon. Feb. 25, 2013 10:40 pm

joeq, here's a pic of the fire in my DS 1500 after a 24 hour burn--no shaking or other tending in that period, still plenty hot--and the hopper after 24 hours. Hopper was full up to the rim after previous night's shaking--you can see about 6" of coal has fed down into the firebox.
Fire 24 hrs 1.jpg
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Post by joeq » Mon. Feb. 25, 2013 11:35 pm

Man...you guys are tough! Decisions, decisions. Good quality hopper fed or cylindrical antique. Can I have both? (I know what William and such would say. If I bought a base heater, I wouldn't need both) :D Thanx for sharing the stories guys. The temps here are in the 30s these past few days, and even tho I wouldn't mind letting the fire go out, the wife and 1 of my daughters keep "riddling"(just learned this term from my new video), and filling. So I've been intentionally "neglecting" my stove tending, and it seems to be living OK. (I do like to monitor the draft with my "new" manometer, and have found with it shut, it gives the perfect flow of .04.) So you Northerners are probably in for another month or so of coal burning, but I think my season will be ending after our next "storm" they're talking about. I'm almost out of fuel, and don't know if I want to purchase another small load. I saw the price of gas in my neighborhood just went up to $4.00 a gallon. If the heating oil goes any higher, I may think of of a stove upgrade sooner than later. Out for now.
P.S. MV, nice looking 24 hr bed of coals :drool: And relating to your car story, I like your brothers taste. I've been a Poncho fan for yrs, and had my share of GTOs. Unfortunately, they've priced themselves out of my market, so I'm left playing with Trans Ams these days. But don't get me going on this topic, or my computer will run out of ink. :D I can't resist posting a pic of my street 65 I had a "few" yrs back.
Image

 
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Post by lobsterman » Tue. Feb. 26, 2013 11:31 am

joeq wrote:
lobsterman wrote: Sorry if you are tired of hearing about it, but we love our old base heaters.
PS This is what she looks like this morning after an 18 hour

Someday, lobsterman, I'll find a beauty like your older stoves :D
I only have one because of 1) Wiliam's classic videos and 2) I totally lucked out finding one in great condition close by at a steal of a price.
PS I had a 1964 Catalina in my youth.

 
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Post by MarkV » Tue. Feb. 26, 2013 4:32 pm

joeq wrote:And relating to your car story, I like your brothers taste. I've been a Poncho fan for yrs, and had my share of GTOs. Unfortunately, they've priced themselves out of my market, so I'm left playing with Trans Ams these days. But don't get me going on this topic, or my computer will run out of ink. :D I can't resist posting a pic of my street 65 I had a "few" yrs back.
Nice car!!! Seeing that pic, I'm pretty sure my bro's was a '65 also. I just googled some '66 pics and his defintely had the more angular look of the '65 roofline, plus the grill inserts were more rectangular, without the taper toward the center that the '66 grills had.

So I guess I can't count on your support for the T-bird restore, Mr. Poncho man? :shock: That's ok, the GTOs were pretty special. I only got to ride in my brother's a couple times before he sold it, but man, did it move. I also like the '65 and '66 Bonneville coupes and convertibles. Not exactly a muscle car, but they looked sweet. Think I built an AMT model of one those as a kid.

Gonna have to spend more time over on the Cars/Trucks/Cycles board. Haven't checked that one out much yet.

The base heaters do sound great, and the people who have them are real zealots. But it 's like buying anything old...you either have to know what you're looking at, or have someone you can drag along who does, else you can buy problems that take a lot of time/$$$/resources to get fixed. I'm not in either category, which is why I shopped new. I'm pleased with my choice, obviously, but the base heaters do appear to be tops in burning efficiency and heat output.

 
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Post by joeq » Tue. Feb. 26, 2013 4:33 pm

You say William's got a "Classic" Stove video? I just bought a Surdiac "how to" video, and if there's one out there for "Old Classics", I'ld love to purchase it. Anyone got any info on it? I saw the You Tube video about lighting the old base heater that I believe was done by Mr. Sherrick, and found it very entertaining and useful. Is there a DVD pertaining specifically to old stoves?

 
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Post by MarkV » Tue. Feb. 26, 2013 4:34 pm

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