Coal for Sale

Okay people, now for a report for those who have hand fed stoves...... I had a fire in the big Glenwood No.6 for the past two days to see how this coal burns. We've had lows in the extreme low 40's and upper 30's here so I lit the stove. The coal seems to be harder than the Reading Coal I have been supplied with for the past two years. Trust me, the Reading Coal is nothing to write home about, but; base burners are amazing creatures and they complain very little about what they are fed.
The Newport Coal lights up just fine and as I said seems to have less hydrocarbon in it than the Reading Coal by comparison. It requires a little more air to get going but that might be because of the still warm weather conditions rather than a characteristic of the coal itself. It produces a nice blue flame that is shorter in length than the other coal and therefore that's how I suspect it is a little harder with a higher carbon content.
It burns nice and even and will sustain itself without going out.
I have not noticed any clinkers or excess ash. So far all I have seen is a fine, white powdery ash. That is a good thing in my opinion. The smaller coal may be coming from a different source (hence red ash reports.)
I have no complaints at all about the combustibility of the coal.
My only complaint is that there are rocks mixed into the load I received. I'm not fond of jammed grates, so I will have to be extra careful and hand pick the coal as I fill the buckets. However, getting this at half price is worth a little more effort.
Once the heating season is actually underway. I will report again.

Second weigh in/out in the keystoker was 104 lbs rice coal in, 45 lbs ash out, or 43% ash. Coal is not bright and shiny. It is rather dull. I have had coal given to me in the past that was not shiny but burned ok with normal amount of ash. (salvaged from an old coal bin)

Wow! 43% ash???? That means your starting out with coal that is 57% before it even burns. Harmony starts at 93% coal before it burns. Harmony costs 65% more to start but also starts with 63% more coal. Seems like alot of jerk assin around for a couple percent. That's a couple dollars you are saving per ton picking out extra rock, carrying overloaded ashpans twice/ three times as much, having all the outfires,possible grate/equipment damage. AND IT ISN'T EVEN HEATING SEASON YET!!!!!

Yes, high ash but burns well. Leaves behind a ceramic ash, much of it looks like the coal kernels burn burn maintained there shape and fused together.

I am beginning to wonder if this is semi-anthracite. It is in the right region of Sullivan county.

semi-anthracite

It's in the center of Luzerne county.

my mistake, trying to cross reference too many maps and misplaced my markers. NA appears to be on the western side of the northern field.

I don't think the properties of the ash are going to give much indication of the rank of the coal.

Berlin wrote:I don't think the properties of the ash are going to give much indication of the rank of the coal.

Semi-anthracite in general has up to 20% in ash based on a description I read. That statistic got me thinking about the possibility.

If you have a glassy, chunky kind of ash, then why is the stuff I have producing a fine, powdery white ash? There doesn't seem to be a lot of extra ash in what I've burned so far. Two days rendered one full pan of ash. That's pretty close to what I normally get. I wonder if the difference is that my stove runs on natural draft whereas, your stokers rely on a forced draft which might burn the coal at a temperature above its fusion point. Since we don't have an analysis sheet, we have to guess as what it is, I suppose.

I saw one chart that indicated the higher the iron content, the lower the ash fusion temp. However, it wasn't a huge range of temp. Started at 2300 deg. F. at 11.35% iron oxide in the ash and went up to about 2850 deg. F. at 7.72% iron oxide in the ash, then was declared unfusable with lower iron oxide percentages.


Most of the fused ash i am generating crushes easily. If you are shaking grates or stirring the fire, then you are probably crushing the ash.

My guess is that since this coal is not run through any separation process, the quality will be more inconsistant. There may be pockets of good coal and pockets of not as good coal in the pile.

Iron is one of many factors affecting the AFT of coal ash. There are many other minerals responsible as well as whether the fuel is burned in more reducing or oxidizing atmosphere. A dark red ash coal in a stoker may be barely pink in a hand-fired. The color of the ash is indicative of the AFT, with darker reds being generally more likely to have lower AFT's but as you approach the lighter oranges and light pinks, the color and shade may not translate to either a high or low AFT.

I will say this about the sample I had. It is much more dull in appearance and is much softer than the other coal I have. It also seemed to break easily by just handling the coal. When it burned the coal bed swelled up slightly which is indicative of either sub-anthrasite or bituminous coal. The large clinkers and the large quantity of ash was almost unbelievable. SO I mixed the remainder 50/50 w/my other coal and it burned pretty well but mixing it 50/50 is to much hasle to be worth it in the end for me.

Correction!!!

I made a slight weighing error on the ash. The second keystoker run was 104.2 lbs coal used and 42.6 lbs as produced for approx 41% ash. Tonight I did one more weigh and used 94.6 lbs of coal and produced 40 lbs of ash or approx 42% ash. Obviously the ash includes unburnt coal.

Ok, after topping off the hopper to weigh the coal, I emptied the hopper of NA coal and filled it with a mix of Sherman Buck (80%) and Blaschak rice (20%). I will let it run overnight and top off the hopper tomorrow morning and put in a clean ash bucket. I will take one or two test runs of this coal mix to compare.

This week I've been testing the Newport vs. Jeddo. Both are called buck, but both have a lot of undersized pieces. The testing consists of "normal" offseason DHW runs of 7-30 minutes plus a few longer runs to make some steam. Stoker set on 8 teeth = 40 lb/hr of feed; air varied based on fire appearance in steam runs to try to approximate EFM fire pattern.

The Jeddo went first. In a little under 4 hours of cumulative run time spread over 3 days, 154.9 lb were burned and 20.1 lb of ash and unburned coal were produced, for a total of 13.0% ash and unburned. I believe Jeddo normally runs 8-9% ash in lab tests, so 4-5% of the coal went unburned. To those who aspire to 0 percent unburned this may seem like a lot, but the OE manuals I've seen say the normal amount of unburned should be around 10-15%, and that an excessively low unburned coal percentage is a sign of too much air. In fact, the ash ring during the test was bigger than ideal, indicating too much air. If the test were repeated I'd expect the unburned percentage might be higher.

Then came the Newport. Early on I got the impression that this coal needs long runs to fully catch, so I stretched out the runs (most between 14-37 minutes). It also seems to be less dense than the Jeddo. In a little less cumulative run time than the Jeddo, 133.9 lb were burned and 30.2 lb of ash and unburned coal were produced, for a total of 22.6% ash and unburned. The visible amount of unburned coal was higher than it was with the Jeddo, the fire looked different and the ash removal system worked harder. The coal did hold the fire for over 10 hours without the stoker running, and gave overall performance closer to reasonable than I was expecting.

Mike

After reading thru this thread, a few thoughts stick in my head. It seems that the allure of something below market price is so attractive to us that we are convincing our selfs that a product with a high percentage of rock burns as well as coal. The other point we need to consider is the amount of wear on the verity of different heating systems we use by running such a large percentage rock to coal. The old addage "You get what you pay for" may doubly apply here. Excesive componant wear can be very costly to repair. Just my 2 cents.