Dad Is Thinking of Switching to Stoker

Dad burns pea coal in a 23 year old vermont castings vigilant. Burns are inconsistent, you come down in the morning, stove is still alive, but after you rake and re set it sometimes is all day before you are generating real heat again. My thoughts are, time for a new stove, and, given my dad is 77 years old, maybe a stoker would be friendlier. Dad loves his vigilant and hates the design of most of the stokers. But he's tired of fighting it. This is the hand fired forum. Would anyone try to tell us not to switch?

A stoker sounds like a good idea. Instead of fighting with the hand fired, he can tinker with the stoker.
I say stoker and I run a hand fired boiler.

i put in a 40lb bag and change the half full ash bin , before I go to bed in the stoker. can't get any easier than that. if i'm lazy , I can change the ash bin every other day. one thing to think about though , is losing power.

As for electric, When your stoker goes out, does it keep burning for a while, so that you could keep the fire going if the electric comes back on in two hours? Does it provide any heat for a little while?

my fire goes out in about 5 to 10 minutes. you need the combustion blower going into the grates to burn the coal. theres a thread on battery back up system , you might what to look at that.

tmiraglia wrote:As for electric, When your stoker goes out, does it keep burning for a while, so that you could keep the fire going if the electric comes back on in two hours? Does it provide any heat for a little while?

This was the first year I played with that power failure fear, a little bit back we had that ice storm and high winds , this is the first year running the stoker up until then we had a Franco Belge running at my Moms house and I have a Victory 700 which is an American build of the F.B. just bigger.
As the wind howled and the ice thickened we had several brief interruptions in the power I slept very little that night with visions of that big house of hers and all them pipes freezing if the juice went down for the count .
I calmed myself by thinking of the Big Party I was goin to have as the only guy with heat .
My plan is that I have a spare Victory stored in a friends garage we are going to move it to Moms basement where I will pre measure and cut all the pipe needed to connect it in place of the oil sucker an should an emergency ever crop up I'll have a heat source that will sustain temp well above freezing in the better part of the house in no time .

i was here last night reading posts about 2:00 a.m. and poof , out go the lights. i'll go to bed , be on when I get up. wrong. came on about 10:00 tonight and it's frigin cold in here. got the stove going and the kitchen stove going. have a nice brand new generator with a nice cover sitting buy the front door. I can't get it outside and start it and I hate to ask for help. i'm going to snag a propane radiant heater and couple tanks.