Good evening Guys,
Last week I picked up a new DS Machine Anthramax coal stove from there manufacturing and retail store facility in Gordonville, PA. I should start off by saying that if you read back through my posts over the years I am very much a coal stove/wood stove nut who loves to drive my wife CRAZY by installing and then removing several stoves a year from our living/dining room. Anytime a new stove comes along or I find an old stove that uses what I would consider unique technology I take out the old and bring in the new. This process involves pallet jacks and the tractor and a whole host of other items required to move heavy items when you don't have any available help for heavy lifting. As you can see in the pictures below I have started to use 3/4" PVC pipe as a very effective mover of heavy items once they arrive on the hearth. I was first intrigued by this new DS Stove when I heard that they are using secondary heated air to burn off the coals volatile gases before allowing them to go up the chimney and thus being able to extract some extra heat from the coal. This process also helped with reducing if not eliminating puff backs when a new load of coal was added to the already hot/running stove. The only thing about the stove that I was not overly excited about (this would be an understatement) was the removable hopper. I hate this style of hopper fed stove, and I do truly mean "hate". Hitzer also uses this type of hopper in there 50-93 coal stove and so does the Alaska Kodiak hand fed stove. I have owned both in the past and while both were great stoves the hopper was awful! So, please take this into account when I bash anything about the stove that has to do with the hopper. Please note that I am not against hopper fed coal stoves, just the kind that use this type of hopper system. I think the hopper system utilized on the FrancoBelge coal units was an excellent design and one that should be improved and copied by perhaps modern manufactures like DS Machine. This however is not yet the case and so while removable I am going to at least try this hopper out until I can ether not take it any more or it begins to grow on me (The second part is just not going to happen).
Why do I so detest this style of hopper stove? I see hopper fed coal stoves as a fix for stupidity. Kind of like a mechanical self leveling loader on a tractor. It was brought to the market because some human or user of that equipment was perceived to be so horribly inept that the manufacture felt instead of educating the user on how to better use the device they already had in the way it was already made they should instead engineer something that would allow the user to just continue being an ignorant moron but achieve better and more improved results thus allowing both to feel better about them selves.
With the self leveling loader if the person was able to master the art of feathering the hydraulics they would not need all that extra crap hanging off or over the control arms of there loader. In the stoves case, if the person would just take the time to properly learn how to load there coal stove they would find that they are actually able to load more coal into the stove when the hopper is removed then when the hopper is present. There is less dust and mess and it sure as heck is a lot quieter to load! However so to avoid the retort that I may have used hopper fed stoves in the past but this one is different, tonight I loaded up my new coal stove for its first coal fire. Please note that for the last two previous evenings I have burned small wood fires to cure the paint. I first put in one full 25 pound coal bucket of nut and stove sized coal into the stove with shovel. When empty the stove looked like I had hardly put in a handful let alone the whole bucket. So I loaded two more same size buckets into the stove. I know many of you use wood to get your coal fire started but I like filling the bottom of the stove with coal and then adding a good sized handful of match light charcoal to the middle and filling in around it with more coal. This forces the air to come through the grates just where the charcoal is located and effectively turns it into what looks like a blast furnace. Within 5 minutes the coal around the charcoal is lit and on its way to heating your home. After approximately 10 minutes or so I closed the ash pan door and allowed the coal to catch by using the all the way open bi metal thermostat. I want to make a quick note that DS's bi metal thermostat and flapper is light years better then the competition that uses a galvanized lightweight metal flap. The DS flap is heavy cast iron and closes at a steep angle thus preventing a LARGE induction of fresh oxygen to the fire bed. On the cheaper designs used by other manufactures the flap is held with a magnet and when the bi metal thermostat starts to open the flap it pulls and pulls until the flap brakes free from the malignant and fly's open hitting the fire with a large burst of fresh oxygen and at times causing a puff back. Obviously with the DS design this is reduced significantly if not eliminated.Once the coal started to really catch I filled the hopper. Instead of just adding my coal to the fire as I would in a stove without a hopper I got to dump the coal clinking and braking all the way down the hopper chute onto the coal bed below. Instead of being able to nicely pack each piece of coal into the back of the firebox and really get the coal bed banked up in the back my shovel was blocked by a steel hopper forcing its way once again into the forefront of stove operation. Once full the stove held exactly 95 pounds of nut/stove sized coal. All coal was weighed using a digital scale and the bucket weight was subtracted each time. Has you can see in the pictures below while the hopper no doubt does hold some additional coal had it not been there I could have put in much more coal from the front to the back of the stove. However once again I am going to try this hopper thing. Once the hopper door was closed the fire took off rather quickly. The stove design does allow some excellent air draft to be pulled though the fire bed and up and out of the stove. I did not run into any smoke or smell coming out of the hopper when I had the loading door open during the filling process. It is not like a Vermont Castings Defiant/Encore where you can open the top loading door and not have any smoke come out into the room but it was well designed all the same. As you can see in the pictures on ether side of the hopper are the secondary air vents that allow preheated air to mix with the smoke/volatile gasses before they pass up to your chimney and thus burn them up before they escape. As I said before this not only makes the stove burn much cleaner but it also allows the unit to take what would normally be lost BTU's of energy and heat your desired area. With most of the stoves I have tried in the past I would usually have a strong "coal" gas smell outside when starting the stove. With this Anthramax even after running up and down the road I did not get even a hint of that tell tale smell. (Encase you are wondering it was a nice clear crisp evening with no wind) The internal air ducts appeared to do there job and burned up most of what was about to travel up and out the chimney. Once the hopper was full I set the bi metal at the desired setting and went on about my evening.
So far so good and while the wife and kids are away for the weekend the dog (my first born daughter) seems to be very happy with the new stove. I will have to see about this hopper but I have a feeling it will find its self removed from the stove and in its place a baffle plate that does not interfere with the loading or viewing of my nice new coal stove.
Some items of note:
The stove has a hidden cook top surface that does get VERY hot even when burning a small wood fire. There is no doubt in my mind you could easily cook on this thing, say during a power outage.
The stove comes VERY VERY VERY well packaged. In fact I have never had to brake out the wrecking bar and hammer to brake apart stove packaging before. This really is an underestimated plus as other stove manufactures out there do the bare minimum and it shows when you try and get it home and installed and you have chips and scratches in the paint.
The stove is VERY heavy. I do not have the exact weight in front of me but fully assembled it is a ball buster and should probably come with a free hernia operation gift card. (This may drive the price of the stove up slightly)
The CNC machines Anthramax plate just behind the main loading door looks very neat with the coal flames behind it. It is also my understanding that they can custom make these plates with your name or logo which would be a nice touch.
The ash pan covers the ENTIRE space under the shaker grates! That's right, no more ash on one or the other sides of your ash pan that you then are forced to shovel out of the stove and back into the ash pan. Whats the point of having a sealed coal stove so the ash cant escape out into your living area during a shake down when you have to shovel out the ash into a dusty mess after a few days of use. Why other coal stove manufactures have not come to this conclusion prior to now, eludes me. (FrancoBelge did actually do this but I cant think of any others.) Although a well built ash pan in my opinion it is a bit on the heavy side and I could see some of the older coal burners having a maybe a bit of a hard time moving it around. One thing they very much need to fix ASAP is cut the darn back off of the thing so it works like a dust pan scoop. This make it MUCH easier to empty and stops a lot of the fly ash when you dump the pan.
The heat shields really do an amazing job of keeping the heat off of surrounding objects and yet allowing the heat to escape off of the stove and out into the living area. As many of you know that have children and grandchildren if you have flimsy heat shields on the side of a stove it is just a matter of time until one of the little dwarfs decides to use there new Louisville Slugger take home bat from the baseball game on your new stove. Once a dent is in the heat shield it is almost impossible to get out. The way these are constructed and installed the wee little people are really going to have to put some ass behind that swing to make a dent this time. Also with a one year old toddering around it is nice to know that if she gets around the barricade the entire stove (that she can touch anyway) is not going to burn her except maybe the front glass.
The shaker grate design is the same that they use for there other stoves on the market. They are a well built grate that looks similar to a Harman Mark II/III grate. I am looking forward to trying pea coal on them as it is sometimes cheaper then nut/stove and is MUCH easier to move around.
The air wash does a nice job even when burning wood. I did notice that at a lower burn it did not keep the glass clean but this is the case with almost every other stove on the market today or yesterday for that matter. A huge plus is that the air wash and secondary combustion is completely adjustable and controllable by the end user. This is a GREAT feature that gives you the user much more control of how your stove is going to burn.
I am sure I will add more to this review as times and use of the stove goes on. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have and I would be more then happy to take additional pictures if you so desire. Overall I am very pleased so far with the stove (less the hopper) and am very much looking forward to burning it this winter.
Thanks again,
Glenn
You have a very interesting perspective on the hopper issue, one that I am intrigued by & plan to follow closely. You are planning to keep updating this thread on a regular basis !!.......... aren't you ? And to think that I was feeling deprived by owning a stove without a hopper. Have you done threads on previously tested stoves ? I would like to see a thread on the Alaska Kodiak hand fed stove by someone, someday. Thanks for sharing. 
As with any firebox with corners it collects ash and unburnt coal in the corners which can only be cleaned by a good poking session. I have found poking from below works best. The stove is very controllable (on a MPD) which is a plus. My stove also is hopper fed and I have no problems with it. The exit location of the hopper has a lot to do with how the fresh coal is spread over the burning fire. My firebox is 16" square and the hopper delivers coal dead center on the grates. With hopper loaded and fire burning at 400 deg. the stove has gone a full 20 hrs without tending with plenty of fire remaining and the hopper near empty. I have a basement coal bunker and before loading the hopper I wet the coal lightly which results in zero dust. If dust control is a factor oiled coal can be bought from some distributors at extra cost of course.
Much of the time I just poke & slice from below & can get good results that way.Some day I would like to update to a bigger stove... but which one ?? I am watching,listening 
