Coalpail.com Forum

After a break from the board for awhile i thought i would post some pics of the first full load of coal delivered to my new house..........and the help i had in putting it in the coal bin.

The coal is sub-Bit coal that is about 11'000 btu...its ROM coal so has a fair amount of fines but also has some lumps that were pushing 2 feet long....and my firebox is not 2 feet long so a bit of work with a 10lb club hammer and i have usable coal

Its not from the mine i work on (we mine met coking coal with a swell factor of 9++,very uncool things happen when you try to burn our coal).....the coal i've got here is from one of the last mum and dad coal mine operations in New Zealand at Charleston on the Westcoast of the south island.....about 20 miles from my house.

Looks like ya had a good crew helpin ya U!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Welcome Back! FFred's right,I like Your Crew! If that's one of Your last mines available,and it's 20 km/miles away,I'd start stocking up Your Supply,Mate! Oh,Congrats on the new home!

Hambden Bob wrote: ↑

Tue. Jun. 02, 2020 8:40 am

Welcome Back! FFred's right,I like Your Crew! If that's one of Your last mines available,and it's 20 km/miles away,I'd start stocking up Your Supply,Mate! Oh,Congrats on the new home!

Its one of the last small 'mum and dad owned and operated' mines....the people that own it also run the local campground/motorhome park.....there are a number of larger commercial operations up and down the 'Coast that i can get coal of varying burn characteristics depending on what i want.....but i would rather support local folks

This coal has interesting burn characteristics....it burns to a fine white powder ash almost like wood ash with very little clinker forming...sort of like lignite but this stuff is way higher btu than lignite.....

freetown fred wrote: ↑

Tue. Jun. 02, 2020 6:33 am

Looks like ya had a good crew helpin ya U!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They are helpful....wife was impressed that they were actually really helping....but not so much when she came home to holstein children

Welcome back! You might have to give the help a few days to get the job done! Nice pics.

Welcome back UH!

So, did you bring the stoker boiler with you to the new house? OR, are we building a new boiler?

-Don

StokerDon wrote: ↑

Wed. Jun. 03, 2020 9:07 pm

Welcome back UH!

So, did you bring the stoker boiler with you to the new house? OR, are we building a new boiler?

-Don

Hi Don

The boiler is sitting in my fathers shop 8 hours drive from where i'm living now.....i'm going to bring it here when i go to get all the other stuff i had to leave behind cos our move got made in a hurry due to the entire nation being put under house arrest for sweet & sour sneeze disease......my shift pattern was supposed to be 7 days on 7 days off and i was planning on going back to get the boiler along with everything else on my days off.

But due to the social distance crap we have to deal with now the company has changed us to monday to friday due to transport issues so i haven't been able to go back and get anything.....supposed to be going back to 7&7 on the 15th of this month....at this stage.

I was literally in the middle of loading the truck with our furniture in Dunedin on Monday 23rd of March when our Glorious Comrade Prime Minister made a panic snap decision to close the country down and force everyone to stay at home...we where given 58 hours notice of a total lockdown....we finished loading the truck and at 8pm i boosted north for Westport using all of the 290 diesel chugging japanese horses that Mr Mitusubishi had stashed under the cab of the truck, made it here in 8 1/2 hours....log book chucked out the window, speed limit breached halfway up 4th gear with 2 to go....there was not a lot legal about my trip.
Got here to the new house at 4:30am.....15 minutes later mum and dad roll up to help me unload....bit of a surprise as i didn't know they were going to come up to help.

Anyway we all had a sleep on the floor of the house and at about 8am started unloading the truck and were done by 2pm having just dumped furniture and boxes in the appropriate rooms altho we did set the beds up ready to use, mum and dad left to go back to Dunedin and i continued sorting things for a bit before having a nap from about 5pm until my wife arrived with the kids at 8pm...it was a "hi....bye" sort of meeting and i left to drive the truck back to Dunedin....again no cares given and no open road speed limits adhered to, made it back to Dunedin at 4am....had a sleep at mum and dads until 7am then took the truck back to the rental outfit picked my car up did some urgent errands and got on the road back to Westport at about 10am....due to the roads being full of people trying to get home or whatever for the lockdown i didn't get back to Westport until 11:30pm....1/2 an hour before the lockdown began.

Lol 6 hrs sleep in 67 hours and 1,350 miles driven......it seems you can operate off energy drinks for a surprisingly long time.

Well, glad you made all those long trips safely!

Are you planning on burning the coal in the boiler this year, or do you still have the stoker stove?

-Don

I gave the Stoker stove to a friend who watched me build it and use it and appreciates it for what it is....it wouldn't work here as the dimensions are all wrong for where it would need to go in this house

The new place has a multi-fuel stove with a wet-back coil that i'm using the coal in...its a nice caveman simple stove....altho it is reminding me again why i wanted the fire,ash and coal handling outside at the old place.

Pressed and enameled steel outer this shows the damper bars for over and underfire air Being a multifuel it has a grate in it that's only about 3 inches deep but is nearly the full width of the firebox and is located about 4 inches back from the front of the stove.....allows it to also burn wood and build up an ash bed without the wood ash falling down thru the grate like happens if you try to burn wood in a dedicated coal stove.... however on coal this configuration means that once you have the fire started and running when you tend the fire you need to rake the coal at the back of the stove forward into the grate area and then add any new coal at the back of the firebox....this keeps smoke out the stack to a minimum as most of the time as long as it has a low swell factor even the worst coal will burn clean with a blue tinged flame as long as it has sat at the back of the firebox and 'cooked off' for awhile before being burnt.

I have plans for central heating of this place we are in now but i will have get an approved boiler to get a permit to make it all legal...then i will plumb my boiler in parallel as its way more efficient than either of the two air standards legal available boilers.....but that won't be this winter.