What Size Coal Stove to Buy

Is the house well insulated?
My 1950's cottage had/has none in the walls.
A Mark II at 72,000 btu/hr on a cold 10* and windy 20 mph night can not keep the house over 65*...
I have a bigger stove 130,000 btu/hr for this winter.
Hitzer with the hopper feed is very nice to use.
My new DS Machine basement #4 is a hopper fed stove.
A fan is almost necessary if you have a poor layout for air circulation.
An indication of how big a stove you have to have is how long a runtime the oil goes for in the winter.
Check the gph rating of the oil burner.
Or have a home heating audit done...
that will tell you many things.

CapeCoaler wrote:Is the house well insulated?
.

That's a big factor as are the windows or the thickness of the walls. 6 inch walls can almost cut fuel usage in half.

I think most of your questions have been answered. The 40,000 BTU I recommended was gross output. You will have to resign yourself to colder outlying rooms unless you do as Jpete suggests to better distribute the heat which is not easy as he pointed out. Even then there will be drafts as the cold air returns to the heater from those further rooms. The best of course, is as Richard S recommends, a central boiler using existing heat distribution.

What is your chimney and where is it located. Outside wall or inside and size.

To get your feet wet at minimal expense why not get a coal Chubby used. You can always get close to your money back if you decide on something else and you will learn a lot more about your needs.

Richard

Thank you to all for your help and suggestions. There certainly is a lot more to consider than I thought! I'm hoping with the layout of our kitchen/living room/dining room/small side room being rather close together - and relatively small rooms that these would stay pretty warm. I'm not so sure about the den on the farther end of the house, or the 3 bedrooms upstairs. We will probably have to use a fan. We would not put in a central boiler as our oil burner is only about two years old. I like the idea of "getting our feet wet" with a chubby coal stove, they definitely seem to be a reasonable price, the website says they start at $599. (Does anyone out there know what the recent price is for the large coal chubby?) My husband liked the look of the chubby, too. We will be definitely be calling them. Thanks again for all your help.

There is a used Chubby on Craigslist for $250 in Stratford CT. Don't know if that is near you.

Richard

Give Larry a call today.

Larry Trainer, Designer of the "Coal Stove Chubby" Telephone 781-293-7990

He is a really great guy. He will be able to answer all of your questions. There is no better place in the world to buy a Coal Chubby Stove, than from the manufacture himself!

Sure you may find a Coal Chubby Stove from a private owner somewhere, but when getting one from Larry, you will have the piece of mind and the satisfaction of knowing that it will be just like new, built for another 30 plus years of trouble free operation, and Larry, the Chubby Guy, will become a good friend to have too.

I give Larry Trainer and his Coal Chubby Stove an A++++++ in coal stove design and customer sevice.

Having owned a Chubby for years I must admit they are nice. But my Harman now is the cats meow.
The ideal setup would be to put a Mark III in your basement and duct the air to the first floor areas..like I have done.

The trouble with installing a coal stove in the living area you can over heat yourself in that area easily. A Mark III is a big stove. Put's out lot's of heat. If it was in the basement and you had some duct work to pump the heat up I'd go with that. This is what I have and works fine. So I'm thinking a Mark II or I. The blower will blow you out of the area as they are strong and throw very hot air. If your living room is open to your kitchen area I'd go with Mark II if it is a smaller area not having a wide opening to the kitchen I would stick with the Mark I otherwise you won't enjoy the living area..
Remember Anthracite has to have 3 to 4 inches of hot red coals going all the time in the box in order to keep from going out so being that is a minimum you'll have more when burning on cold days. Also Coal has twice the BTU's as wood. The stove will have a minimum heat it runs with also. You can't just smolder 1 piece of fire wood like a wood stove to get the heat down. That is why some guys here try to limit they're box size but that doesn't work out well. So if the stove is too big you will be fighting it all the time to get the heat down. I use to open my windows all the time when I had my Cubby in my living room. I should have gotten the Chubby jr. It worked out well anyways as I moved the Chubby to the basement and got a small free standing fireplace in the living room for holidays and those rare cold summer nights.
If You duct the air from it like I do and pump it up stairs you might be able to use a Mark II...
You don't mention were you live in NE but if it's down below NH or VT into Ma. A Mark II can be too large a stove. I hope this gives you some perspective..

Larry, The Chubby Stove Guy...
Your house layout, heat loss and heat factor all determine what size stove will work for you.
My Mark II 72,000 BTU is in the living room, normally runs 275*-350* and is very comfortable.
60% open floor plan, 1000 sq/ft, beds and bath on north side, poor wall insulation, good ceiling insulation,
65* if the wind is blowing 20mph and the temps are at 10* otherwise it is 72* inside.
I like the house hot when it is cold out and cold when it is hot out!
We run the furnace blower to warm the basement and balance the heat upstairs.
One is always looking to have a better system or make some improvements so the idea of easing into it with a smaller stove is a good one.
You will never get the perfect stove in the beginning.
We started heating with wood then moved, quickly to coal.
Now I am installing a bigger hopper fed stove in the basement.
This should circulate the house air well without the furnace running all the time, but there is a big grate over the new stove.
The basement will soak up a lot of heat but the stove is big, 130,000 BTU so that should not be an issue.
It has a bi-metallic thermostatic air regulation so hopefully the temps will stay in a tighter range with less fiddling.
You get the idea; the first stove will never be the last one.
Having a small stove is better than no stove and you can always trade up if you have a quality stove to start with!

I'm new to coal... Let me say this first.

I've got a Mark II. The house is 1400 sq Ft. I figured it would be best to oversize the stove and run it at half mast so to speak. I had wood before and it was similarly sized and need the BTU's during winter storms. So I didn't want to get one smaller.

What I've learned is Coal can Idle much better than any wood stove. I've had it going for the last two weeks strait. I can get it to be 150 degrees with the flu pipe just warm. It will burn at a rate of 10 pounds a day easy, really it's less than this I put this much in for a few days than half as much. I'm just keeping the stove full. What's funny is the few colder days I just put the fan on and it kept the house temp at 72. Too cool. By the way it's in the living room. No way I'll pay to heat a dirt basement.

I say get a bigger stove and idle it down. This is the great thing about coal.

To those that say not to get a bigger one. Why don't you just turn it down? Do you have too much draft or is there something I'm missing.

you only can turn it down so far before it will go out. Like I said above..You have to have 3 to 4 in. of red coals going with Anthracite. 6 to 8 with softer coal at all times. You can get it real low with wood but not coal.
This is out of a "Firemans" bible..from the days of coal boilers.

I know my coal stove is a lot cooler than the woodstove would run. Maybe it's due to the fact that My wood stove was a modern non-catalytic. So it ran hot or not at all.

On my Mark II I set the damper at 1/4 turn and it doesn't go out. Not even close. I shake down every 24 hours. That's when I add a bit to keep it going. Maybe it's the coal I'm using. I got it from down Scranton where the proprietor said it was "the best you can get". Anyway it lights real easy with just a bit of sticks, like a hand full. I get the wood going a bit. Than I just add the coal and it lights right up.

The fact remains you need 3 to 4 in of red coals going at all times..Thats were the heat lies. Of course that leads back to the size room you have it in..yours may seem cool but your room size and outside temps you may think it's hardly running.
He's better off digesting this stuff and making a decision. I can't help him as I don't know how his rooms are laid out and were he lives in NE..I've been running the stove for almost a week now straight. But it's in the basement and in a 2000 sq foot 2 floor cape in Northern NH 90 miles from Canada.
Cape Coaler may be right in his judgement of going with a Mark I first.. then tradeing up if it's not enough. Either way a Mark I or II will keep him from freezeing. Mark III probably will blast him out unless it's 0 out.

Stanb999 wrote:I know my coal stove is a lot cooler than the woodstove would run. Maybe it's due to the fact that My wood stove was a modern non-catalytic. So it ran hot or not at all.
On my Mark II I set the damper at 1/4 turn and it doesn't go out. Not even close. I shake down every 24 hours. That's when I add a bit to keep it going. Maybe it's the coal I'm using. I got it from down Scranton where the proprietor said it was "the best you can get". Anyway it lights real easy with just a bit of sticks, like a hand full. I get the wood going a bit. Than I just add the coal and it lights right up.

Do you have a baro installed? Maybe all your heat is going right up the chimney?

DVC500 at last wrote:

Stanb999 wrote:I know my coal stove is a lot cooler than the woodstove would run. Maybe it's due to the fact that My wood stove was a modern non-catalytic. So it ran hot or not at all.
On my Mark II I set the damper at 1/4 turn and it doesn't go out. Not even close. I shake down every 24 hours. That's when I add a bit to keep it going. Maybe it's the coal I'm using. I got it from down Scranton where the proprietor said it was "the best you can get". Anyway it lights real easy with just a bit of sticks, like a hand full. I get the wood going a bit. Than I just add the coal and it lights right up.

Do you have a baro installed? Maybe all your heat is going right up the chimney?

Yeah, I got one two weeks ago. Not a big difference. The draw is still low because it's warm out. I expect it to do the thing when it gets cold. You did see where I said the flue is barely warm.

captcaper wrote:The fact remains you need 3 to 4 in of red coals going at all times..Thats were the heat lies. Of course that leads back to the size room you have it in..yours may seem cool but your room size and outside temps you may think it's hardly running.
He's better off digesting this stuff and making a decision. I can't help him as I don't know how his rooms are laid out and were he lives in NE..I've been running the stove for almost a week now straight. But it's in the basement and in a 2000 sq foot 2 floor cape in Northern NH 90 miles from Canada.
Cape Coaler may be right in his judgement of going with a Mark I first.. then tradeing up if it's not enough. Either way a Mark I or II will keep him from freezeing. Mark III probably will blast him out unless it's 0 out.

That could be it... Our house was built way before anything like central heating. In fact it didn't have central heating till 15 years ago. In 1830, you built a house around the chimney. That is the design of this house. Tho now I use a different one for the coal appliance. It is built not unlike your cape. It has 4 rooms down and 4 rooms above.

So yeah, it's heating the "whole" house. If you do the math you see that it's putting out about 5000 or so BTU's an hour or just slightly more burning 10 pounds a day. That's like one of those little electric ceramic heaters.

Trust me when I say this tho, I was gonna shake down the stove on Sunday morning. So I opened the damper 2 turns to liven it up a bit. Well I got to reading on the internet and an hour and a half later the central heat thermostat read it was above 85F. It was pegged and 85 is as high as it reads.