Anthracite-- When to Turn Down the Air?

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ohai
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Post by ohai » Wed. Oct. 20, 2010 5:36 am

Hey all,

By the by: I had a hard time burning anthracite in the rayburn at the house I'm watching - turns out the chimney draft is not quite good enough. Tried burning wood, which was great, but I got tired of reloading it so frequently and found it kind of expensive. So I started burning anthracite nuts with a few 'easiflame' manufactured smokeless coal nuggets mixed in. Works like a charm! The nuggets burn quickly, but easily -- so they keep the anthracite going which gives me that long hot anthracite goodness.

Anyway -- quick question. It's a hand fired multi-fuel stove, and the firebox pit is about 10 inches deep. Say I have followed instructions and got a nice 2-3 inch layer of anthracite glowing red hot, with blue flames. Now I want to fill the firebox to the top, so I can leave it all day and get the best performance. After I have thrown all the extra coal in, should I leave the air input and damper (output) at maximum until the whole firebox catches and is glowing red, before shutting it down? At the moment I wait a few minutes and shut it down, but the firebox is still black and smokey, which suggests I am wasting fuel up the chimney.

In short: should there be a large deep layer of unburnt anthracite above red hot coals, or should it be red hot all the way through?

Thanks!

ohai

 
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Richard S.
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Post by Richard S. » Wed. Oct. 20, 2010 6:28 am

Coal is like a freight train, hard to get going but once it is going it's very hard to slow down. So you want balance bewtween getting an adequate fire and preventing as nuclear meltdown. You're not going to want to let it get way out of control because it will take a very long time to slow it down. You're best bet is to experiment a little with slow increases to see what works best. Once you have established an adequate fire that should be the time to shut the air down.


 
coalnewbie
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Post by coalnewbie » Sat. Oct. 23, 2010 5:32 am

The firebox on those Rayburns are kinda small and to get the right BTU they were designed to burn good anthracite. You may have a sooted up chimney already as you are a guest at the house and there all sorts of fuels laying around my guess is that a lot of soot is present as the owners already were playing around. They are tough to overfire but easy to underfire, never saw a runaway Rayburn and in the winter of 1954 in England my parents tried to melt the paint off to say warm. As we are coming up to November in Ireland you are ready to get the most out of the stove. Output from most Rayburns is at best 50,000 BTU and if they are feeding rads up in the bedroom (the usual Euro setup) you need to get that fire going. So how many rads is the stove supplying and is there a small circulating pump in the system or is it just convection driven? If the later you won't get much heat up there and you need a hot fire.

In your installation is there a damper at the base of the chimney just over the stove top and how are you adjusting that? When you get the fire really rolling what is the temperature in the main oven? That is the clue as to a partially blocked chimney. Yes, you can use wood if you have the patience to stoke it every fifteen minutes but you pay dearly for soot and that is the real cost. If you are needing other coals then either the coal quality is not good or something is wrong. All brickettes manufactured these days are imported to Ireland and quality is variable - is yours a good source? With good coal you can make those things dance with practice and I am uncomfortable that you need other stuff. Remember, uniquely, on these stoves there are two air paths to the chimney. One through the fire and the other though the ovens and they mix at the chimney base. If you can't make 450F on the main oven something is blocked somewhere. When taking the temperature make sure the heat retaining lids are shut.

Lets not just concentrate on the heat aspect they are great cookers and that is the basis for the AGA success in the US and a Rayburn is just an AGA with an extra boiler - here they are $20,000 stoves for the 4 oven models. A shoulder of lamb in the warming oven overnight and finish it off next day in the main oven is a unique taste experience. It all about high humidity in the ovens and constant fresh air - unique. Martha Stewart, Mel Gibson, James Cameron etc. all have them but sadly in NEPA and the surrounding areas we can't afford them and rarely have the room for them as they have to be second stoves. The few dealers that exist charge way too much money to care for them and the non coal ones need servicing every six months and the quality of the internals is suspect - yep, the old coal ones are the best by far. We can't even buy the coal ones here as the rich and famous don't want to be bothered by that nasty coal stuff.

Sounds as though you are moving up the learning curve - a lot of fun. Warning, warning - as you get your technique down you will fall in love with that stove and that can mean the expense of getting your own Rayburn. I would have one in my home but they are really a "North of the 38 parallel", 12 months a year, stove. We boil our brains out here in the summer and really freeze in the winter and Rayburns can't cut it but for your part of the world they can be perfect. Towel rails, boot warmers, I have even seen people iron with them. The learning curve can be interesting.

Waiting for the pics.

This may be a duplicate as I had a power failure on upload - if I did I apologize.

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