Pictures of Your Stove

stelradCoal wrote:That Andes is pretty nice. Were all those gas lines nickeled.

I think so, although as you can see they are quite rusty now. It was still in use in the basement of a house (the gas half anyway) until around 12 years ago, one of my friends got it for free, it was in his barn. When he was moving he offered it to me for free. It's in an enclosed porch right now, so it's in a dry place, it won't deteriorate any further until I can start to work on it.

Please post more pics of your stove if you can. Thanks.

Heres mine a 12 year old Keystoker 90-DV heating about 4000 sq ft. two floors of my millhouse about

coal boiler and bin

my sf250

and another, this is after I topped it off before going to work.

Alaska Channing III with Coal trol TS1

What else can I do to improve?

What about a whole house humidifier under the top heat exchanger, say a small tray about two inches deep, a fill valve with small float and inline filter?

BK

Nicely done BK, great example of wringing every BTU out of those lil black beauties!

The humidifier sounds like a nice idea as long as you can put a secondary containment device to prevent spoiling all that pretty duct work with a leak.

keystoker kaa-2 in series with my oil burner using oil boiler controls to control coal boiler

What kind of unit is on the oil burner ?

coalstoves wrote:What kind of unit is on the oil burner ?

It looks like a Riello oil burner.

riello oil burner pensatti boiler works great if oil prices were not through the roof 3.34 a gallon here in new hampshire. with the coal I burn 35-40# in 24 hours costs me 4.25$ a day

Hello fellow Coalburners

I started with a Harman Magnum stove, and was impressed with the quality of the product. My existing propane boiler was failing and given the ever increasing price of propane, decided to go with coal.

As with the Harman Magnum, I decided against using the simple full on or pilot mode control that Harman still ships with these units and designed a micro PLC based control system for the boiler. In many ways its similar to the Coaltrol, in that it provides a proportional control for stoker on/off time vs the idle or full on most manufacturers still cling to.

It is the same PLC, a Crouzet M2, that I used with the first Harman stove, but the program has grown substantially and includes reset control, proportional / integral control mode, a coal useage counter, a reverse anticipator fucntion, and a scrollable display for water temp, outside temp, manual control mode, Summer / Winter mode and a coal useage counter. The PLC can read 0-10V signals with 8 bits of precision, not great by todays standards, but plenty for this level of process control.

The boiler water temp is monitored by a Crouzet temperature transmitter, this unit, the grey box on top of the boiler transmits a 0-10V signal proportional to the water temp to the PLC. The outdoor temperature is monitored by a small temp sensor with a probe in the outdoor combustion air inlet. This sensor provides another 0-10V signal, that the PLC monitors and adds to the temp setpoint when the outdoor air temp starts to drop below 30 deg.

Ive reconfigured the esisting Johnson controls to provide a two tiered overtemp limit control that will initially energize the fan coil to dump excess heat, and then if the temp continues to rise, will cut power to the stoker and combustion air blower to try and bring the temperature down by cutting off the fuel supply.

Ive added an outside air supply to the combustion blower and a speed control to the blower motor. When stoking the blower runs full tilt, but then cuts back to an idle speed that helps keep a larger fire bed in times of low demand.

A small muffin fan was added to the stoker cover and is wired with the stoker motor, provides cooling to the motor during prolonged periods of operation, since thse motors can run very hot.

A Tripplite APS with a size 29 marine deep cycle battery provide 8 to 12 hours of backup time in the event of a power failure, and prove a measure of surge protection on the incoming line power.

So far Im very pleased with the operation of this unit, my coal useage for the month of January has been about 50# per day, and provides both heat and hot water for a 2000 sq ft house. During the summer months I burned about 12# per day for hot water. I estimate using between 4 and 5 tons for the year. With propane at $3 / gallon, it should have payback in 2 years for an investment of about $5000. Not too shabby.

More VF3000 Pics

Great job. Shows what modern electronics and some system engineering can do in extracting more efficiency out of old boilers that were likely designed by "seat of the pants" engineering. Perhaps as non coal heating costs continue to rise and Anthracite's use expands, new products will emerge. I congratulate you on your design and implementation.

Very nicely done. I see you have a flex hose on the intake to the combustion fan and I assume you are drawing air from outside. I also noted that the restrictor plate had been removed. I would like to do the same thing with outside air but I am reluctant to remove the restrictor plate. When I first fired my boiler 4 years ago I didn't have the restrictor plate installed and it created too much positive pressure in the boiler which made flue gases escape from the hopper. How do you compensate for that?