New Coal Stove Owner

I am a new coal stove user and I have a lot of questions. I own a Leisure Line Hyfire II. I started it up yesterday and it is running fine. The most of the questions I have is with the Coal-trol Digital Model TS2 Thermostat. My stove is located in the basement and I only have one burner running. How is the best way to move the heat to the upstairs. The blower does not run, I wondering is this do to my CFT to high or low. Any one that has this stove I would like to talk to.

Which blower doens't run? The convection blower? It will only come on when the feed rate gets to a certain point, it my only blow very slow at times, and you may not notice it. Have you turned up the thermostat to over the room temperature, so it feeds more, the blowers should come on low and then if the feed rate is higher, they will continue to increase.

Everything plugged in correctly to the coaltrol? Can you Manually Run the fan from the thermostat? Hit it once and change the FSA to FSM and raise it to 40-60 or so and see if the fans come on.

Do you have the heat jacket or anything piped up stairs for heat? That is easiet way to move the heat unless you have stairs and a good way to move the heat up and any cold air returns to help circulate, etc...

Give a bit more of your setup, thermostat location, layout of where the stove is, etc.....

Yes I can run the blower from FSA to FSM.

I do not have a heat jacket. But I do have a plate to go over the stove to be able to blow the air into a vent system.

My CFT is set at 8 an the min is at 6 and the max at 40.

My stove sits in the basement and I have a ranch house. I have open stairs and was hoping that the heat would travel up the steps the stove sits approx 10 feet from the steps and off to the left. But it seems that the blower is not blowing the heat very well.

The thermostat is located at the bottom of the stairs and is set at 74.

is the temp. at the setpoint? 74? If so, the blowers may not come on if it's not calling for heat, try raising the temp up a few degrees and wait to see what happens. if not, raise another couple degrees, it takes a while for it come up to temp, but the feed rate should increase and the blowers will increase accordingly....

The blower could be on very low and you just don't notice it.

If you're wanting to to primarily control the heat upstairs we'd recommend installing the thermostat upstairs. Right now the thermo sounds like it is fairly close to the stove and it is in the basement with the stove. The temperature set on the thermostat in this scenario is going to satisfied fairly easily and so it will run at a fairly low feedrate and the fans may not run very often. Depending on the heat to travel up the stairway without a return air duct/vent/hole on the other side of the house linking the upstairs and the basement, you will get poor circulation of the air through the house. Without proper air circulation between the basement and the upstairs you will not get the kind of temperature control you're wanting upstairs.

If your stove is in the basement and you are trying to heat the first floor, your best bet is to install a heat jacket and a little duct work.

What you really want is for warm air to go up to the first floor, heat the first floor, and cold air return to the basement to be re-heated. The easiest way to do this is to install a hot air duct from the stove up to the first floor. At the other end of the first floor (or wherever makes sense), install a return air duct and plumb it back to the stove. This will move warm air up through the hot air duct, through the first floor to the return air duct and back to the stove to get heated.

In this situation, the thermostat should be somewhere between the hot air duct and the cold air return. When the thermostat senses the air is too cold, it will cause the stove to feed at a higher rate and the fans will spin at a higher rate -- thereby moving air through your ductwork. If there is no need for more heat, the stove will feed less and the blower fans will slow down too. This will keep air from moving.

Since you thermostat is right near the stove, it senses that the room is at temperature and therefore, the circulation fan will slow down or even stop. That won't really work for you.

Thank you all for your suggestion. I think I am going to move my thermostat and place a floor vent above my stove. My question is should I force the air up through the floor vent or try to pull the cold air throuh it

Depends on the distance and if you have a heat jacket. Sometimes teh stock blowers just can't move enough air a long distance.

I orginally ran my stove with just the hole in the top ducted upstairs, but lost much heat from the sides into the basement.

I use the stock blowers (2) plus and additional one for the jacket and push the air, I found the inline fans to be noisy and I am only running less then 6 feet of pipe, almost straight up. It works for me. The additional heat jacket on mine raised the temp up nicey and control is much easier now.

Since heat rises naturally, I'd tend to put a vent above the stove and blow (somehow) the air up into the living space. For this to work, air will have to return to the basement somehow. Since cool air will fall, having a gap under the stairwell door may serve this purpose nicely.

The easiest thing to do is to get a cigarette or stick of incense and get some smoke. Moving this around the house and watching the smoke will show you where your airflow is going. On the other hand, holding this around your windows may make you want to cry (as it did me) since you'll see any and all leaks...

Good luck! It just takes some time to sort out. I've also seen (with an old wood stove, but would work here too) a metal hood that someone hung from the ceiling. Essentially, it was a funnel shape that came down near the top of the stove and hung around the stove by about a foot. At the top of this funnel was the floor vent in the ceiling. What this did was eliminate all the warm air in this guys basement from hanging around the basement ceiling and stairwell (stairwell is usually the highest point in the basement). Cold air would then flow up through the funnel (past the stove) and be warmed before exiting up to his living space. With no fan, you could actually feel the draft created by this and the basement ambient temp dropped a lot (which means more heat was going where he wanted it.)

The stairs to the basement is open stairway. I think I need to place a floor vent in the floor above the stove or close to it. I have a plate that goes over the top of the stove and I can run duck work to that floor vent and let the stove fan push the hot air up to that vent. I will take a picture of the plate and post it so you can see what I am talking about. I really appricate you helping me through all this.

Phil

That sounds like the good solution. That will keep hot air going up and allow cool air to re-circulate back down to the stove.

Right now, we have a hand fired Harman Mark 11,{ 73,000 BTU's} in the cellar.We left most of the hot air furnace oil duct work in place-just hanging in mid air. There is a cold air return.We popped out the top panel on the kitchen cellar door,and screened with hardware cloth,so alot of heat travels up the stairs. A small corner fan hangs from the cellar ceiling just a few feet from the bottom of the steps,and the stove is a few feet to the right of the steps.We are planning on using one of the blower holes on the front of stove to shoot some of the hot air towards the back of the house in the cellar to get it a bit warmer in that section, but other than that,it seems to do a pretty good job heating the house- and the cellar. We are seriously thinking of going automatic with Leisure Line,but wanted to get to know about coal with this first. We are about to go get our 3rd ton,and we are still under the budget for switching over to coal.There is the small hood hanging over the stove left in place from the oil furnace,so Jim will likely mess with that and see if he can make it better if it needs it.This is still less work than wood,less money than oil,no parts to break down,but more work than an automatic.It does make me a bit nervous when I'm reading about all these breakdowns on automatics though,so we're doing alot of reading before we jump into another stove.

dbjc364 wrote:Right now, we have a hand fired Harman Mark 11,{ 73,000 BTU's} in the cellar.We left most of the hot air furnace oil duct work in place-just hanging in mid air. There is a cold air return.We popped out the top panel on the kitchen cellar door,and screened with hardware cloth,so alot of heat travels up the stairs. A small corner fan hangs from the cellar ceiling just a few feet from the bottom of the steps,and the stove is a few feet to the right of the steps.We are planning on using one of the blower holes on the front of stove to shoot some of the hot air towards the back of the house in the cellar to get it a bit warmer in that section, but other than that,it seems to do a pretty good job heating the house- and the cellar. We are seriously thinking of going automatic with Leisure Line,but wanted to get to know about coal with this first. We are about to go get our 3rd ton,and we are still under the budget for switching over to coal.There is the small hood hanging over the stove left in place from the oil furnace,so Jim will likely mess with that and see if he can make it better if it needs it.This is still less work than wood,less money than oil,no parts to break down,but more work than an automatic.It does make me a bit nervous when I'm reading about all these breakdowns on automatics though,so we're doing alot of reading before we jump into another stove.

Hi, dbjc364 and Happy New Year .
First off its great to get away from using oil which you already realized . One thing to realize about reading these posts are a lot of people usually only speak up when they have a problem or concern . You get a very small percentage of people surfing the web just to brag about there purchase and how well they like it .Although we do have a lot here on this forum . But with that said, I speak with many people everyday that just love there stove and are just looking for advise on maintenance which we gladly give. There are literally thousands of stoker users out there of all brands,so to see a few issues pop up every now and then is to be expected and we use that information to continually improve our product and correct as much as possible . A lot of issues are just the newness of using the automatic stoker stoves ,especially after burning wood or a hand fired stoves. Sometimes we tend to think that we need to constantly change or monitor settings which in reality once the controller is set properly all you need to do is change the temp setting that we want the room to be . Aside from loading the hopper and taking the ashes out of course . So whatever your choices are you will be happy burning coal no matter which product you purchase . Although we only sell through our dealers but if you have any questions about our stoves maintenance or concerns you are always welcomed to give us a call at the factory we would love to hear from you. Thanks, Dave