Common coal and coal appliance misnomers we must learn to forget

 
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warminmn
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Post by warminmn » Thu. Oct. 25, 2018 1:45 pm

Dont burn coal. Your wife hates being warm. Keep using fuel oil, propane, electric instead and you'll be warmer...


 
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Rob R.
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Post by Rob R. » Thu. Oct. 25, 2018 4:29 pm

It is cheaper to heat with "free wood" than coal.

 
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CoalJockey
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Post by CoalJockey » Thu. Oct. 25, 2018 5:44 pm

titleist1 wrote:
Thu. Oct. 25, 2018 1:01 pm
Coal heat will make your house filthy.

I wish our cats created as little filth as our coal stoker. :x
Similar to my favorite: Wood pellets are “cleaner” to handle and burn than coal.

Plllllleeeeeeaaase... :x

 
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Post by KLook » Thu. Oct. 25, 2018 7:44 pm

I own land, a skidder, 2 chainsaws, a woodsplitter, and a dump truck.......my wood is free......

Kevin

 
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nepacoal
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Post by nepacoal » Sat. Oct. 27, 2018 4:02 pm

The biggest myth of all...

Stoker Don is done restoring grand old boilers. The stoker farm is done growing.

 
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coalkirk
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Post by coalkirk » Sun. Oct. 28, 2018 10:30 am

nepacoal wrote:
Sat. Oct. 27, 2018 4:02 pm
The biggest myth of all...

Stoker Don is done restoring grand old boilers. The stoker farm is done growing.
When pigs fly! I know there are boilers out there somewhere just waiting to be brought back to life at StokerDons boiler farm!

 
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Post by McGiever » Mon. Oct. 29, 2018 10:36 pm

Misnomer...Mortar is put between bricks to hold the bricks together...nope, mortar is there to hold the bricks apart. :what:


 
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Post by Sunny Boy » Tue. Oct. 30, 2018 7:40 am

KLook wrote:
Thu. Oct. 25, 2018 7:44 pm
I own land, a skidder, 2 chainsaws, a woodsplitter, and a dump truck.......my wood is free......

Kevin
The bugs, sore back, and worn-out shoulders part are all that is "free". Been there! :D

Paul

 
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Post by coaledfeat » Fri. Nov. 02, 2018 9:58 am

Family and friends will "gladly" help put in ten cords of firewood for some beer and a hotdog!

 
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BigBarney
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Post by BigBarney » Wed. Nov. 07, 2018 12:16 pm

People believe that the combustion air has to go up through the

grates to burn coal. You can have the air go up and be preheated to

go down and mix with more air to burn nearer the grate and exit on

the grate level. Bottom Combustion.

BigBarney

 
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lsayre
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Post by lsayre » Fri. Nov. 09, 2018 6:37 am

One seriously major boiler application misnomer is that zones have some magically fixed "friction head" value. Friction head is and always will be a variable quantity. The more GPM your circulator is capable of delivering into a single zone, the more friction head it will generate within the zone. There is no fixed friction head value for a zone. There are however definitely fixed friction head values for circulators.

Another big misnomer is that if you have more than one zone being fed by a single circulator the friction head requirement goes up as zones open, and the more zones you have open at one time, the more friction head your circulator must overcome. The fact is that friction head noticeably goes down progressively as more zones come open. And by the time that 2 or 3 or 4, or more zones are open it is dramatically down. This permits the circulators GPM delivery (which is intricately linked to its BTUH delivery) to go up progressively and automatically with the opening of each additional zone. This is the exact opposite of what most people seem to intuitively expect would happen. And it is the very reason why single circulator with multiple zone valve systems work, and also work well. The highest friction head a circulator encounters (or more properly, generates, seeing as I almost intuitively slipped here...) is when it is delivering into a single open zone.

Intuition makes for seriously bad science!!!!

 
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Post by Sunny Boy » Fri. Nov. 09, 2018 8:21 am

lsayre wrote:
Fri. Nov. 09, 2018 6:37 am
One seriously major boiler application misnomer is that zones have some magically fixed "friction head" value. Friction head is and always will be a variable quantity. The more GPM your circulator is capable of delivering into a single zone, the more friction head it will generate within the zone. There is no fixed friction head value for a zone. There are however definitely fixed friction head values for circulators.

Another big misnomer is that if you have more than one zone being fed by a single circulator the friction head requirement goes up as zones open, and the more zones you have open at one time, the more friction head your circulator must overcome. The fact is that friction head noticeably goes down progressively as more zones come open. And by the time that 2 or 3 or 4, or more zones are open it is dramatically down. This permits the circulators GPM delivery (which is intricately linked to its BTUH delivery) to go up progressively and automatically with the opening of each additional zone. This is the exact opposite of what most people seem to intuitively expect would happen. And it is the very reason why single circulator with multiple zone valve systems work, and also work well. The highest friction head a circulator encounters (or more properly, generates, seeing as I almost intuitively slipped here...) is when it is delivering into a single open zone.

Intuition makes for seriously bad science!!!!
I found this out the hard way. I had to add a couple of short, temporary loops to manifold of the radiant heat floor system while I was building sections of my shop building, until I could get all the floors poured and those loops plumbed in. The circulator was working too hard with just the two loops of the first finished section. With five loops when done, the circulator was working fine and there was enough reduction of flow resistance that I could start adjusting flow valves to tailor the room temps, such as cooler for assembly bays and warmer for the paint room.

Paul

 
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lsayre
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Post by lsayre » Fri. Nov. 09, 2018 8:44 am

Another frequently encountered boiler misnomer is that circulators must work harder to move water up hill (or up to various stories or levels of a house or building). A circulator moving water 50 feet horizontally (or 500 ft., etc...) requires exactly the same amount of work effort as a circulator moving water 50 feet vertically (or 500 ft., etc...), provided that the exact same length is traversed and the exact same number and type of elbows, valves, etc... are encountered along the way, and also provided that the water is returning to its source (which would be the boiler it came from), as for a closed loop system.

Short version: In a closed loop system there is no such thing as height induced "head" or "head pressure". There is only friction induced head, or more properly, head pressure. And any gravity induced friction "equivalent" experienced on the way upward through the gravity field is exactly neutralized and balanced by subsequently falling down through the same gravity field on the way back to the boiler. I think the misnomer is caused in large part by measuring "head" in units of feet.

Yet another example of intuition making for bad science.... And to think that before science there was only intuition. Scary thought.

 
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lsayre
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Post by lsayre » Fri. Nov. 09, 2018 9:07 am

Sunny Boy wrote:
Fri. Nov. 09, 2018 8:21 am
I found this out the hard way. I had to add a couple of short, temporary loops to manifold of the radiant heat floor system while I was building sections of my shop building, until I could get all the floors poured and those loops plumbed in. The circulator was working too hard with just the two loops of the first finished section. With five loops when done, the circulator was working fine and there was enough reduction of flow resistance that I could start adjusting flow valves to tailor the room temps, such as cooler for assembly bays and warmer for the paint room.

Paul
This sort of misnomer was actively promoted by the HVAC community for many decades. Bell & Gossett actually published a paper decades ago which stated that the friction head of a closed loop zone could be reasonably accurately determined (for the specific case of 3/4" copper pipe) by multiplying the overall length of the zone in feet by 0.04, and then subsequently multiplying the result by 1.5. This publication had me completely thrown off course for years (and in fact until just recently) as well. The only nominally valid part of this (for certain HVAC applications) was the 1.5X part of it. The 0.04 part is pure bunk, as is the concept that zones have fixed head values. The only reason why it appeared to be nominally valid at one time was that the typical low head Bell and Gossett home heating circulator(s) dating from the time of the publication sort of worked well with it, and it was easy.

And when people added in the extra lengths of extra zones, friction head went up, whereas in reality it goes down. No wonder why most field workers in HVAC preferred (at one time at least) individual circulators on each zone. B&G had totally messed with their (um) "head".

 
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Post by NoSmoke » Tue. Nov. 20, 2018 3:55 pm

My user name is NoSmoke for a reason, people automatically equate coal to billowing black clouds of smoke coming out of locomotives.


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