The igniter lives!

As mentioned on another thread, we did a number of live public demonstrations of the long awaited Coal-trol Digital ignition system at Leisure Line Stove's open house on October 13th. As promised we took video at the event and I put together a quick 2 minute video of a coal fire starting using our system. The video is available off the main page of our website:

http://www.coaltroldigital.com

Download it and take a look (4.5MB download). Got any questions? Post away!

Looks very impressive--Congratulations!

Now I'll ask the newbie question, why is it that just before the fire comes to life at 14 minutes, does so much unburned coal slide off the grate?

Very ingenious , I'm assuming that coil is always going to be in the fire? Have you done any estimations on how long you expect it to last?

Greyhound wrote:Looks very impressive--Congratulations!

Now I'll ask the newbie question, why is it that just before the fire comes to life at 14 minutes, does so much unburned coal slide off the grate?

Doesn't look to me like it's more than a handful, how many times are you going to light it in a season?

The demo was done on a more or less clean grate. Before the ignition was run I preloaded the grate with fresh coal. In normal situations the majority of the grate would be filled with ash and partially burned coal. However, even with a grate of new coal only a little bit got pushed off the grate.

The element is in the fire, but more toward the edge than in the core of it. Even so we have been doing a lot of testing to make sure it holds up and we'll be continuing testing for at least another couple of months. We aren't releasing it for sale until we're convinced it will hold up during normal burning and will start a fire reliably a great many times (on the order of hundreds of times).

For instance we're currently testing an element that has been in a fire of various intensity for a couple weeks now without acquiring any new damage. The element was damaged in some prior testing where we forced greater than designed amounts of current through it. Even with that early damage that nearly destroyed it the element it holding up, having completed dozens of starts and been in fires for a couple hundred hours without any further damage occuring.

We'll be publishing longevity estimates as we get closer to finalizing things.

I saw the demo run around 5 times while at the open house on Saturday, it never pushed any new coal off the grate as long as there was ash from a previous fire.

C'mon guys finish up the final little details and get some of these baby's ready to ship. My wife is waiting for one! She is very happy to hear about not having to light the fire manually.

With the set and forget nature of the Coaltrol we now have the complete picture to make coal burning truly easy. Now if I can just finish up the automatic coal load and ash removal it will be a true "girlie man" operation!

That's cool.

How many remember the old hot iron charcoal starters, you stuck the loop in under the charcoal and plugged it in....hmmmm.

made even more famous on Home Alone when put on a door knob...ouch!

If only it were that easy.

Matthaus wrote:With the set and forget nature of the Coaltrol we now have the complete picture to make coal burning truly easy. Now if I can just finish up the automatic coal load and ash removal it will be a true "girlie man" operation!

That would be girlie man in a tutu.

I know, takes a bit more than that...!! Just kidding with ya!

A pink tutu at that

Hi all:

I've had the good fortune to have done a lot of paddling in my adult life; canoe and kayak. Between the two groups there is a bit of a rivalry similar to that between the Girlie Men stokers and the Manly men hand-firers.

Upon seeing a fellow in a kayak, the canoe paddler would comment: "Twice the paddle, half the man." to which the kayaker would reply: "Half the paddle, half the brain."

All in good fun!

You can fit more beer in the canoe though. I have done few 8 day trips myself down the Susqhuehnna between Owego and Meshoppen, about 60 river miles altogether if I remeber correctly. There's map here if anyone is interested that i osted back in '05

http://nepacrossroads.com/viewtopic.php?t=169

Paul, Whats the ETA to the public of the ignition system? Thanks.

We'll soon be getting roughly 50 or so units in use in a sort of "beta" test. Some OEMs, dealers, and others will get them and test them for at least a couple months. This will ensure we haven't missed an problems, either in the product itself or the accompanying installation instructions. Assuming that all goes well, we're aiming for either a late winter or spring release of it to the public.

Sorry, but we don't have a hard release date for you guys yet. Nor do we have a list price to publish yet.

If you need a beta tester pm me