In Da Club

Any one know if any company makes a coal boiler that is hand fired + stoker in the same unit. I know I want my cake and eat it to.

After living with both as a kid - boiler tender - make that the one that got the crappy jobs ..... I would scrap the water tube boiler rather than live with it.

I don't understand? Cleaning a boiler is a dirty job no matter what, even an oil boiler gets dirty, the design of it just means a different brush is used or different technique.

coalshop wrote:Any one know if any company makes a coal boiler that is hand fired + stoker in the same unit. I know I want my cake and eat it to.

Not that I'm aware of, firstly they use different sized coal. Typically rice which is about the size of an eraser on a pencil. This size coal was actually thrown away as refuse in the early part of the century because they had no use for it until the stoker came along. The hand-fired units use pea and nut which is much larger. If you throw enough rice on on top of a lit hand fired stove you can just about smother it. The smaller sizes need the forced air or they won't burn for very long.

To make something like that work you'd need a stoker that burned pea which they have now, Losch, AHS, AA will all burn pea. The Losch's aren't built anymore. Most of my customers that had AA's used pea. I'm sure it could be designed but its going to be a lot more expensive and you're going to runinto other issues. you don't want parts that are designed to move like stoker has sitting there for extended periods of time not moving...

You could opperate an AHS or AxemanAnderson boiler like a hand feed. You would use the standard 'funnel hopper' with the AHS, but with an AA boiler, you would have to remove the access cover on the tranfer head of the auger, and make a sort of funnel so you could shovel coal down the feed tube.

With the Axeman Anderson,, you could manually 'shake' the unit with the ashing handle.. With the AHS, which uses an electric motor to run the shaking mechanism, you would have to rig up a crank handle to replace the motor to manually shake the ashes..

Both the AHS and AA will burn Buckwheat, or pea, using the stoker mechanism.. Both will also burn Nut,[if hand fed] but the amount of heat created, and air needed through the firebox and heat exchanger are unknown to me.. I have burnt some leftover nut coal in my AA260, nothing seemed different from burning Pea coal.

With either the AA or the AHS, to create rated BTU output, the combustion fan still needs to run, and a circulator pump needs to run, so you are not independant from electricity. If the boilers were plumbed just right, and the chimney had a strong draft, you could get maybe 25-40% rated BTU's by allowing gravity flow for the water, and propping the inspection door closed to make the chimney draft pull through the coal bed, instead of over the top of the bed.. You would have some heat, but not rated.

Greg L

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LS, don't you have any patins on any hand fired boilers with a over fire stoker unit insert all in one furnace.

My 'Big Bertha' boiler is a hand feed, with a stoker firepot on wheels that can be rolled in and used instead of hand firing the boiler.. But this is a 'one-only' unit, Custom made and I doubt that it could be duplicated for any reasonable price.

Greg L

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cArNaGe wrote:Unloading the actual boiler is becoming a challenge. I have a boom on the 3 point hitch of my tractor and it will lift it. But I have to choke up the chain so much I can't lower the boiler to the ground. Rigging up some planks and my trailer ramps to slide it off the truck. I have to have someone come help me and I'm stuck here by myself.

You never asked me to come help...could have ridden my "Hardley" down to visit you and your pink house.