Shop Time w/T.W. Friends

Good morning everyone, have a great and blessed day. It’s 45* where I am at my sister’s place in Northern California.

 

Past Tech with Rusty, 1940's heating edition - our forefathers went to the cellar every day all winter to deal with this stuff...
(Actually it was the stay-at-home lady of the house who did more furnace tending back then usually. )

Just finished the daily stove service, the Warm Morning stove is easy if a bit fiddly to service. Coal is always burned from the bottom up, the combustion air comes in under the fire. Eventually you need to shake down the ashes and add fresh coal.

Some stoves and all furnaces/boilers I have ever seen have what are called "rocker grates", these are made of cast iron and have either a linkage or separate handles to turn (rock) the grates breaking up the what is left of the coal after all the carbon is burned out of it, it then falls in the ash pan below.

High quality (Reading brand) coal will burn down to just about dust. Lower quality coal has more impurities which remain behind in the form of what is called "clinker" which can jam up in the grates. Cheaper coal is not only a PITA for a hand fired stove but also produces less heat, it is the carbon that burns (86-97%), the more impurities per pound the less carbon to burn.

Below is the fire box of a large furnace or boiler showing the rockers. The white on the sides is fire brick.



Rocker grates and the frame they sit in - all cast iron.



The Warm Morning stove has a slider grate, it takes more fiddling to shake down.
In theory you slide the movable section in and out - in practice doing that causes you to wake up to a cold house the next day because the ashes tend to form a solid funnel around the sliding section.
Now you dump all 100 pounds of partially burned coal out and start again.

I use a combination of the slider and angled pick rod to agitate the ashes through the grate.
With almost 30 years of practice it doesn't take long.



The literature supplied with the stove states you can use any size coal that won't fall through the grates.

Experience has taught me with this stove "bigger is better" ( queue @Delta09 for a wise guy comment ) and my coal dealer will pick my shipment off the top of a pile (with a loader), I usually end up with coal significantly larger than the "Stove" grade below.
One ton of good Anthracite has about 25,000,000 Btus = about 180 gallons of #2 grade fuel oil.



"Stove" size coal isn't too common anymore as very few people use the large hand fired furnaces common back in the 40's & 50's, one year after my usual order for "the biggest you have" he said he was worried what he had was too large.

By mistake he had received one load of industrial furnace coal, about 3X larger than the Stove size, much of it was the size of 1/2 a football and a few pieces I had to break with a hammer to fit in the stove.
It was the best burning coal I ever had.

 

I don't know that I've ever seen the coal that we use for the boilers on campus but I do know that we burn through a rail car and a half each day when they are getting run hard.

This picture doesn't really do it justice but here's the stockpile they have.

https://goo.gl/maps/zqiXAKLCvWA1fivw8

 

Kid's new car wouldn't start. Yanked the battery and brought it home because it's a little frosty.

 

Damn guys it’s like 80 degrees here

 

There is a trick to shaking the grates and each stove can be different!1

To much the fire falls into the ash tray not enough to much ash the fire tends to not burn well or go out.

We always used Chestnut .

When the switch to an oil furnace Mom said the first floor was now always cold.

Never changed or sized any of the Duct work which did not help

 

They call it Hell`s waiting room for a reason!!

 

Lasering some wood right now

 

Nice! What size are those?

 

Awesome

 

Flag is 11.5”x6”, other is 9.25”x7.5”

 

You’re not wrong! But if I drive a bit north it cools off dramatically

 

Looks like it cuts the shape also?

 

Since I finally got my big compressor in the garage I can now replace this noisy guy in my shed shop


Much better!!

 

Yep!

 

80s in February is for tourists and snow birds

 

Right about now, I'd be pretty okay with those temps.

 

Sweet!

 

Another single coyote day. We had another one up that took some #4 buckshot, but still managed to run us in circles until the tracks were indecipherable. We'll catch up with him later.

The Tacoma was a champ today. The snow was a good 12" - 14" deep, and the drifts were quite a bit deeper, but I had no problem bombing through it. I don't think the pictures show it very well since the tire looks like it's sitting in 2" of snow, lol.