brunco forced air furnace and anthacite

well i had to give it a try, I have a brunco 190. I got a 5 gal. bucket from a friend to try today. I got a good wood fire going and burned it down to hot coals almost. I then added half of the 5 gallon bucket and then the rest of the bucket in. it wont put out much heat. I have a tempguage on my stove pipe and with wood i usually try to keep it around 350-400. Its hard to even get the anthracite nut coal that hot even with the bottom ash door open. When i close it down it eventually just drops and drops temp.

I read about this problem on this forum the last couple days and this is what alot of people said would happen. what are my alternatives other than buying another stove. I havent read much about bit coal but if i am correct it is very dirty and smokey, and the smell.. I dont think this will work for me. I wonder why with even the bottom ash door open it takes way way longer than wood to get up to around 500degrees. Is there something I am missing? Is there something else I can try?

The brunco models have the forced air but no spinner on the ash door? i wonder if putting a spinner on the ash door would help? I am also think that a 5 gal bucket wasnt even enough to give it a try. The firebox is really large, I would assume i could put about 10 to 15 gallon in at 1 time to get it up to the top of the firebrick?

I appreciate any help.. Thanks

Well, I'm kind of grinning because you are experiencing the same results that I had with the Brunco 190.

If I did keep that beast, here is a few things that I would try.

1) Put a spinner on the ash door. I found that by leaving the ash door open too much, it would tend to cool the fire and give poor results. When the ash door was cracked open just enough and stayed where I placed it, it would heat up faster and maintain the heat better, but still very fuel hungry.

I found that I had to put at least 80 to 120 lbs of anthracite coal in it to maintain good heat.

2) Keep the feed door spinner closed and the blower fan off. When I used the blower fan, it would only forge the fire up front and quickly put the fire out. The feed door spinner would also cool an anthracite fire very fast. It was okay for wood and bit coal though.

3) Try a manual damper before the barometric draft regulator. This will hopefully keep more heat in the very large firebox to facilitate a continuous hot burn.

4) If you don't need the radiant heat from the stove in the room, line the furnace jacket with foil insulation. This will allow more heat to get to the duct work.

5) I even once thought of reducing the firebox in half, by fabricating something over the rear half of the grates and adding another layer of firebrick on top of the ones sitting on the frame. This would allow for a deeper, more compact firebox that anthracite likes to burn in.

As for the bit coal, it did burn it quite well. It was hungry, made a ton of ash, made a lot of black stringy soot throughout the stove, stovepipe, and chimney, and would back puff regularly through the feed door spinner. If you want, go ahead and try some, but don't expect the same results as wood.

The Brunco 190 is a big wood burner with shaker grates and it isn't that efficient of a wood burner either. You probably used 1/3 more wood than you really needed to heat your place with a Brunco. At least that was my experience. They are well built stoves though, but lack the efficiency in design.

You have to remember that anthracite coal is slow and lazy, but once you got it going, you can maintain a nice hot steady fire. Just be prepared to go through the fuel, it's hungry.

thanks doug for the reply. I guess i will just stick with wood. very frustrating though.. I hate the idea of using bit coal for all the soot and smell and such.. i often get a nice wood fire going and cant even see any smoke coming out of the chimney. To me thats a nice clean fire.

I used to throw in a few chunks or a shovel or two of bit coal in with the wood every once and a while, when I needed the extra burn time. Small amounts of bit coal mixed in with the wood did okay and there wasn't any soot because of the hot fire and a lot of air. Just a thought.

The only thing that I didn't like when I did that was after the bit coal turned to coke, it wouldn't completely burn to ash because of the lack of under fire air. The wood likes a nice bed of ashes to burn in, so I didn't shake all that much when burning wood. It gave a better efficient wood burn that way, but the bit coal stayed unburnt.

thanks again but I dont think i want the mess. I even try to keep my wood fires good and hot.when i brush my chimney I really dont get much creosote out. My father in law burns bit coal in his garage and when he has it going it reminds me of a steam powered train. It just boggle my mind still because it burned it but just no heat from it. it was glowing red but no heat.