Coalpail.com Forum

I burnt wood in the Mark III the month before I finished the boiler install. I have to tell ya - that's ALOT of work!! Especially after burning coal for 8 years - was more work than I had remembered. House was warm, but it was in the 50's -60's during the day and 40's at night - sometimes warmer. Most I got out of a load of shagbark hickory was a 6 hour burn - I can get 3x that out of coal if I need to. Bark & bugs everywhere. Going up and down the stairs with a cart load of wood every 3 days got REAL old, REAL fast. Getting that boiler up and running was a Godsend by that point! Talk about polar opposites ...

Since I've had the boiler going for over a month now, my recommendation is to go the other way - get rid of the Hitzer and get a STOKER!

You'll be back.

burning wood for heat BLOWS

My beautiful wife makes silly suggestions all the time. Trick is blowing her off until she comes up with her next bright idea.

This may be a very silly question but why are you dumping ashes into the can inside? Where the ash can billow out and settle on everything inside? Move the can outside and dump away outside. Just check the wind before you dump.

REv. Larry

blrman07 wrote:Just check the wind before you dump.

Right, just another thing you don't do into the wind.

I crack me up

Bootstrap...
You owe it to yourself to (and the Mrs.) to use ONLY the woodburner to heat ur house for a few days...during a real cold snap of weather..
I wouldnt rush to eliminte the coalstove to quick until you determine wether or not the woodburner can keep the house comfortable in ANY weather condition..
Also...besides from the 'mess' you may encounter upstairs....the woodstove will require make up air...which it will 'pull' from your upstairs living space....possibly creating "drafty" areas upstairs that you never experienced with a stove in the basement.
...bottom line...make sure you compare apples to apples before you part with coal...
just my 2 cents

...good luck

now your going to be lugging wood upstairs every 4 hours (into what... bedroom?), or are you going to have a nice pile of logs & bugs stacked N racked alongside the bed?
Heat rises, so it will certainly help with ice dams on the roof and keep the bedroom nice and warm for the bugs during the winter months.

Ok, enough jokes... in all seriousness, adding a tiny woodstove upstairs to alleviate thoughts of mess with ashes and to provide good home heating is just not realistic for the work, efforts, install, etc. (If its simply the atmosphere in the bedroom the wify wants with a lil extra heat for bedy bye time I would consider simply getting an alternative like one of those electric things that look like a toasy fire or those "hang em on the wall" things that make colors and fire and music and also throw some heat http://www.electricfireplacesdirect.com/products- ... OgodI1QARw

I think the title is MIGHT get out. He has not responded so I think he is yanking your chains.

Kevin

As of now, I am going to run the Hitzer at a low setting, the 6th or 7th setting and see how that works. At the very least, I don't really want to haul 100 bags of coal out of the basement.
While she does want the small woodstove upstairs, she and I talked and she wants to keep the Hitzer too. If I can get that baby to run and only have to service it once a day that would be sweet. We'll see how it goes.

Woodburning in a crappy wood stove does suck. I tried wood burning in several stoves down stairs and every one of them consumed wood faster than you could load it(it seemed) and the heat was marginal. What we have now is a Vermont Castings Intrepid. That stove burns very, very well. I burn 50% pine and %50 hardwood. Even with the pine it burns nice and hot. Very nice burning stove and sized appropriately for the area heated.
I would never go back to burning wood from the basement, especially in a dual fuel stove.

The key to burning pine is it needs to be very seasoned and burning hot in a good stove.
I am only buring that because I have an unlimited source about 1 mile away. 90% of it is logged up and ready to be split.

A cold coal stove is silenced and waiting power, an empty chimney is a sad event. Mike

Dude,The Guys are right ! Your Avatar says it all ! Not only that,but I've always liked your posts,also. Perhaps my lazy rear-end will send you a PM and you can give me a call. I'm in a little down time in deer hunting right at the moment. It seems the Amish Folks were set on playing "Rat Patrol" on the land adjacent to where we've been hunting,and rattled the living daylights out of every living thing during their "Live-Fire" drives. We're gonna let it settle down a bit before we slide back on in fer the late afternoon. Talk to 'ya !

I bought a very efficient wood stove at the same time when the girl friend bought me the kitchen coal stove. Having used both wood and coal stoves before, I forgot how much work, mess the wood was. Now eight years later, the wood stove is still in it's shipping box and the only reason I have a wood pile outside is for one of those outdoor fire pits, or when we go camping.

Paul

About wood burning, I got a few nice wood stoves from Vermont Castings. Nice wood flames to look at, nice and functional ash pan with lid, nice cast iron ...but lot of work....even the big Vigilant, taking 24" long logs that you can fill up to the top can't burn 12Hrs long at a STEADY heat output as do my 2 anth stoves. Even the smal Golden Bride having a 9.5" D. fire pot can makes the 12 Hrs period at a steady heat output. NO WOOD STOVE, even when having a Cat. system or the Fire Dome system or the Ever Burn system can match the anth steady confort.
And about the ash dumping Inside of the house, I do so since 29 Yrs and no dust Inside. When switching from wood to anth. I had to make a dust ""eater"" to keep the place clean. Using an old kitchen stove fan and a funnel like cage, no dust and no need to get outside of the house every day.
Having 3 galvanized dust cans, I can load them about 1/2 +/- and take ( 1 can or 2 according to the heating needs) them outside once a week easily, then laying the can on its side I just shovel the ash in the same bag I got the anthracite. If done carefully, it's clean and easy.

Bootstrap wrote:The wife wanted a small wood stove for upstairs. Kinda like it. And being small in size, it doesnt burn much.
My Hitzer is in the basement. Heats the house decently but she raised a good point: Why are we heating the basement? I guess I don't really have to. I mean besides the warmer floors, I have comfy slippers. And the floors arent really that warm as there are dividing walls down there so its only a small portion of the flooring.

No, I don't want the hitzer upstairs. Most importantly, is is produces tons of ash and I don't want that upstairs what so ever.
I do enjoy coal burning, but for what we need in this tiny little shat box house, I think the little woodstove might do it. I might be selling a nice Hitzer 30-95 and about two tons of baged nut coal.

wow talk about coincidence, I was just talking to my nephew, and they burn a woodstove in the basement, it's 90 degrees down there. On the first floor it's around 70-72 degrees, but on the 2nd floor where the family of 5 sleeps, it's in the 50's. So they are in the process of making a large sheetmetal duct, going vertically from the top of the stove, straight up through the inside of a tall kitchen cabinet (to hide it), to the 2nd floor, to heat the 2nd floor.

i.e. maybe try some ductwork on the Hitzer ? Just an idea. Back in the "old days" the old basement furnaces fired with coal, looked like a giant octopus with huge ducts coming off them like arms, that ran to the 1st and 2nd floors, in the floors of each room, were grates that could be opened/shut to let the heat into each room. It worked.

Yikes...I'd seriously put time into disposing of ash without getting it everywhere. I burn two antique stoves and the ash isn't a problem. Carry ash pan outside, dumb it outside. keep ash and dust outside.

The wood burning "advice" dished out in this forum is hilarious. I heated my house exclusively with wood for decades & still heat my shop with it. Who in hell waits until winter to find/cut/split their firewood. Mine's delivered in that condition & I stack it in my shed in the Spring to season. Any critters or bugs that move in during the summer are gone by burning season. As for ash & dust the coal stove is MUCH worse then my woodstove ever was. A shop vac near the stove is mandatory to keep it under control.