Stoker Boiler questions

Arte wrote:Wow , all a little overwhelming , been using a 90 btu wood boiler and ready for coal . Really cold nights in Maine drag it down when garage radiant comes on , then hot water , then bedrooms . been looking at ka -6 from keystoker wondering if its too big . I think my plumber rated the house heat loss arond 69,00 0 ?
house is 1500' garage (radiant) 900' basement (radiant ) 800' . New modular home heats well above 0 but man you can't lug enough wood when it's below 0 . My oil is 100,00 will keep up but sure runs alot . My concern is too much overboil if ka-6 is too big . I probably will only use for winter season

A KA-6 will idle for weeks at a time without "overboiling". If nothing calls for heat, it just runs enough to keep the fire alive...it isn't like a wood boiler that always has a bunch of wood smoldering. Based on your description, a K6 is as small of a boiler as I would consider... a K8 or EFM 520 might be a better bet.

thanks Rob , I'm new to the idea of coal but I wished I had done something besides wood ! I'm thinking ka-6 because I only struggle when it's sub0 for more than a couple days at a time . I've even seen comments about heating water in the summer with these boilers , not sure I want the residual heat . Stay tuned I'm sure I'll have a lot of questions . Gonna finish season with wood then install in spring . Thanks

Rob R. wrote:Now, about the Keystoker KA-6...do you have access to buck size coal? A friend of mine has been struggling with a Ka-6 for a week, it has been running hard to heat his house and creating clinkers in the stoker that sometimes stop the flow of coal. I gave him some buck to mix in with the rice, and now it runs great with no clinkers. If your heat load comes in on the high side of the KA-6 capability, I would plan on running buck or getting a bigger boiler.

I second that. I ran straight buck in mine at first but the fuel economy in the shoulder seasons left something to be desired. Rice idles much better but with that week of frigid weather it ran almost continuously to keep up and produced a lot of clinkers (didn't plug up, though).

Burning nut I haven't even looked for buckwheat size coal. Rice is always plentiful but living where I do I would think that I would be able to find some. I've heard a lot about mixing those two for stokers so you can bet I'm going to give it a try.

Somebody suggested running my oil boiler for a few days to see if it did indeed heat the house well, there are only a few gallons of oil in the tanks from last season and I grabbed one of the 24v relays to put on my Brunco as the PO had a full 110v running to a mercury stat, didn't work so well so I fixed that early in the season. I did find the manual on the boiler, wasn't able to get a good look at the data plate but I found a note that the PO made when he was ordering parts, apparently this is a rather large output boiler although it doesn't really look that big. If memory serves it's on the order of 275,000 BTUs. The people who built this house back in the day had money (the current owners however don't )

I still have to measure my radiators, I have 2 cast iron pipe types, one in the garage and one in the half bath in the garage that will be easy to figure out. The rest of them aren't built like the tube type or old OLD cast iron types. These are more like blocks with fins on them, all of the blocks are the same size and it seems like each room has a different amount of them in each wall cubby where they are mounted.

Once I figure out how to correctly measure these (thanks for whoever attached the sizing chart for the tube/cast iron types, great info there), I'll be able to get a better idea of how much water is in them at any given time.

I have some serious insulation to do on the feed and return pipes in the basement,I would bet when that old oil burner was in use the basement was a sauna

thanks guys good to know , I'm planning on 6 ton so I can see that I probably should get 4 ton of rice and 2 ton of buckwheat for the colder part of winter ?

Not everyone stocks buck...I just mentioned it so you would be aware of the performance advantage in extreme weather. Lots of guys run straight rice and are happy with it.

How did you arrive at the 6 ton figure?

trying to be on the safe side first winter , estimated 6 ton , a couple guys that just started with coal are thinking 4 / 5 ton