Coalpail.com Forum

Hello - new to the forums, but I've been a lurker for a while. With my 3 kids moving off to college by next fall, there's going to be a labor shortage to keep the Wood Gun boiler fired during the Montana winter. I've been looking at options for stoker boiler and bins for semi truck load storage (about 28 ton's I'm told), since the Decker / Sheridan supplies are a couple of hundred miles away (sub-bituminous FWIW).

At any rate, things got serious last night, so I decided it was time to post. A friend of a friend offered to give me this Kewanee boiler with the stoker and 3T of coal, for the cost of disconnecting the plumbing and removing it all from the cellar. He tells me that he remembers that it does "disassemble" into 4 or 5 pieces.

Here are a couple of photos that I grabbed (wasn't thinking about the forum when I took them, and the one I took of the label didn't turn out with a darn - I plan to go back and get a better shot of that in the near future) *** Edit - label photo added to the album

https://photos.app.goo.gl/VKjTszhghMTyxOZJ3

So, the price is right, probably the value of the stoker alone would be worth the couple hundred bucks it would cost to bring in professional plumbers to disconnect and rework his system (I do my own plumbing on my own system out in the country, but not on this house in town). Given the size of his house, compared to mine, I'm guessing it is sized about right, and the fact that he burned the local coal for years with it makes me think it will handle the local fuel. But, the question I have is this boiler a good solution to start out with given the effort there may be to remove it?

Thanks! Pat

Welcome to the forum Pat.

That is a pretty nice look'in boiler from the outside. It is "H" stamped and if I read the tag correctly, it has 35 sq ft of surface area, that's a lot. If the boiler holds pressure, I'd say that is a real good way to heat your house. I don't know anything about the stoker but if it looks as good as the boiler, you should be OK.

A note about pictures on the forum:
It is best to post your pictures right here, in your thread, on this site. Third party hosting sites periodically change the location of your pictures. In the future when someone is looking for this information, it would be a shame if they could not see your pictures since they hold a lot of information.

-Don

Don when I blow up the label I see it as 55 sf of heat exchange surface and a 264k btu/hr net rating. I think that translates to about a 40 lb/hr stoker and 350k gross output, though that's probably derated a lot (maybe 1/3?) by use of sub-bit coal. I don't know about Montana, but for most folks in the northeast that still would be a whole lot of overkill. I like that.

Mike

Actually it's 65 sq. ft., with an "approximate" weight of 1650 lbs. That's going to be a fun one.....

I didn't see the "attachments" option originally when I went to add the photos...see below. I found that data sheet too, thanks for attaching it here. Depending on how sensitive this guy is about his yard, we may be able to lift it right out of the cellar doors using a rented telehandler ($375 minimum rent - for that price I could consider roading my tractor the 10 miles into town). However, I did run into a bigger catch with this deal yesterday. His wife has him second guessing the decision to get rid of it. His words were "she's a bit of a prepper" ...LOL... hopefully, it will still work out.

Before he told me that, I was already shopping for an hopper bottom bin and auger equipment to keep the boiler hopper full!

Someone knows someone with a backhoe. Ask around. I'd bring mine over but it's a bit of a stretch from New England.

europachris wrote: ↑

Fri. May. 18, 2018 12:06 pm

Actually it's 65 sq. ft., with an "approximate" weight of 1650 lbs. That's going to be a fun one.....

I was squinting trying to read that number and at first, I thought it was 65. Then I thought, Naw it can't be that big!

PatInMontana wrote: ↑

Fri. May. 18, 2018 5:02 pm

His wife has him second guessing the decision to get rid of it. His words were "she's a bit of a prepper" ...LOL... hopefully, it will still work out.

Great, now that we all have a serious case of "boiler envy", we might never get to see this in operation.

Seriously though, Thanks for posting the pics and we hope you get to take this beauty home.

-Don

This appears to be a boiler vessel to which can have a choice of different fuels and different means of burning these fuels.

Is not the boiler's gross and net ratings determined, in this case, by what the installed stoker size can produce and not what size or capacity that the boiler is/was built to handle as a maximum capacity?

Sorta like for an automobile with engine options, maybe you want a 4 cylinder or V6 instead of a V8?