hardin Help !!!!

Stove slagged up and pushed ring off of auger drive, i had slowed feed rate down for finer coal. had air draft less than a 1/4 open. will it help to open up draft more. Lost some eyebrow and hair when i opened the door to clean ashes. also found elbow was partially plugged.now cleand

I don't have hands on experience with stokers with rotating ring/elevated retort like yours but I think there's to much fine coal and with the feed rate slowed you get excessive clinker because ash/clinkers aren't pushed out of the retort before they fuse together and push the ring up. I think increasing the air would create even more clinkers. You may want to consider screening fines out til you get coal with no more than 25% fines. Any coal smaller than 1/4 inch I would consider as "fines" and soft coal stokers use 1/4 to 1 1/4 inch coal.
What percentage fines is there in your coal?

guess i will have to screen, this last load is really high in fines over 25 percent i guess. i did turn feed rate back up some and cleaned stove and chimney.
i have not checked it yet today. will post when i do. thanks

burning much better so far with the higher feed rate. Has appeared to have burned the buildup off the inside of stove. Had carbon sparks out of top of chimney for a bit this morning,

I noticed on my Prill that when I slowed the feedrate down, I got more clinkers. Good thing in my case, as it melted ash and reduce the volume, but it still falls into the ash pan and doesn't cause a problem. Reduce my ash hauling by about 1/2. But in your case, it didn't work that way.

I noticed that when I have more fines (get to the bottom of the bin, etc) I seem to get a hotter fire.

I wonder - if you are getting enough heat out of the lower feed rate, it's probably more efficient than the higher feed rate. Might be worth trying to get the lower feedrate to work.

If you could rotate the ash ring faster but maintain the same feed rate, maybe you could break the clinkers up before they cause any problems. Problem is that the auger runs the ring, so slowing the feedrate automatically slows the ring rotation. Only thing is that some stokers only rotate the ring one cog per auger revolution, some rotate it two cogs per auger revolution. If your's is the former, you could modify it to rotate twice as often.

Just some ideas.

Good luck

Hi, I started screening coal . first in a chicken wire screen then in a 1/4 inch mesh . Hand breaking anything larger than about an 1 1/4 in size. question is what to do with fines,I now have a 55 gallon barrel full with no idea what to do with them. Any ideas.

for the price you pay for coal, i'd use them to fill depressions in the yard - they're not good for much else. perhaps you can try selling them back to the mine

a few years ago when i was screening coal for my stoker (I wanted to use up larger sizes that I had before i bought stoker size) I crushed what i had by putting it in rows in my driveway and driving my diesel pickup tires over them. then to screen it I took 1" mesh, rolled it into the size of a 55 gal drum, framed it w/ 2/2's and put a rebar shaft down the middle, and a hand crank on the end, it was sloped @ about 15º. this allowed me to shovel the coal into it, screen it into one wheelbarrow, and have the pieces too large to fit through the screen drop out the other end into another wheelbarrow; worked well. since your getting coal that needs to be screened, you might want to set something like this up, only perhaps w/ an electric motor and a dryer belt to spin it if you want it to be an easy/quick one man operation.