new to burning coal

mje wrote:The stove is at one end of the basement and the door leads to the garage so that's not helpful. The basement stays around 75 to 80 and the basement is not insulated. I put the vents in rooms that were furthest away from the stove like living room and kitchen hoping warm air would rise. I have been reading some about hooking duct work from the stove to vents and am leaning that way.

It tends to work better if the vents in the far rooms allow the cool air to drop to the basement floor pulling the warm air into those rooms. My stoker is in the uninsulated basement of our rancher. I have a floor vent in the far bedroom that is a supply for the A/C in the summer and has flex duct on it. I disconnect the flex duct in the winter at the trunk and let that end lay on the basement floor. You can feel the cool air coming out of the flex and the dust bunnies gather at the floor vent in the bedroom.

Could you guys tell me some names of the coal boilers you are using so I can research them a bit

I use a leisure line boiler ( wl 110 ) hooked up to my oil boiler and it works very well , nice even heat through out the house along with dhw .

mje wrote:Could you guys tell me some names of the coal boilers you are using so I can research them a bit

Axeman Anderson, AHS, EFM, and Keystoker stoker boilers are probably the most common. Leisure Line makes stoker boilers that are quickly becoming popular.

Van Wert stoker boilers don't come up in discussion very much, but they are a good unit with new parts available.

If you don't mind me asking, do you have a budget in mind for a boiler & the installation?

I would like to keep it under 2000 and would like to do the installation myself

Keeping it under $2,000.00 is going to be tough even for a used boiler. If it helps any, you can almost be assured it will pay for itself in about 3 heating seasons. I think a more realistic figure would be $5,000.00 even doing it yourself.

mje wrote:I would like to keep it under 2000 and would like to do the installation myself

That is going to be pretty tough.

Where do you live? I recently saw a nice Van Wert advertised for $1500...bargains come up once in a while, but you better have cash in hand and be prepared to do some work on the unit.

Westmoreland in Upstate New York

Thanks to reading several posts I took one of the five registers 4 x10 I had cut in the floor and fitted duct work to a six inch fan to blow the cool air from up stairs to the basement where the stove is and gained about five degrees in temperature up stairs