Looking for Advise

I'm looking at possibly getting a Harman DVC-500 to help suppliment my house heating. Just wondering if anyone out there has any experience with that particular stove...I know Harman is a good company on the Pellet side of things and being that they're in PA I would think that their Coal stoker should be good as well. I'm trying to get something that is as automatic and easy to take care of as possible...and this stove SEEMS to fit the bill.

Also...this is for the CoalMan. I'm located in Taylor, PA....We live in an older 2 story house with a basement but no coal bin is currently down there (I'm assuming they pulled it out when they did the ELECTRIC heat conversion back in the 60's....don't ask..I have NO!! idea what was going through thier heads) Anyway...I don't think that I would need to burn more than 1-2 tons of coal over the whole season at the most for what I'm looking to heat. My question is...do YOU sell bagged coal (which I know is more expensive) or just deal in bulk delivery? I have access to a pickup and could get the bagged from your location if that makes a difference. I'm just thinking that it may be cleaner,easier,and a lot less hassle to just buy it bagged and stack it up in the basement than to build a new bin and then shovel it into buckets to bring upstairs and wory about dropping a bucket and getting dust all over ect...

Sorry bulk only. That's a 75,000 BTU unit, you can expect to burn at least 3 tons. I have very few that burn less than that and the ones that do are just using it to keep the dampness or chill out of the basement.

Can't give you any advice on the stove.

Thanks for answering so quickly...It's only going to be used for a bit of zoned space heating for a couple years...probably will have it set at the minimum setting or just slightly higher for the area it is going to be used to heat. I have a 15 month old at this point and don't want to put this stove in the main living area just yet.

At 7-10k BTU output (which is actually a bit more than what will be needed for the space according to the heat loss calc..I'm going to setup a fan to push some of the heat into the next room)it goes through less than a pound an hour from what I can see....I figure on a max of 150 days that it MIGHT be fired up for over the heating season. So that's a max of 3600lbs from what I can tell. Now once the boy is a year or 2 older then I would think about moving it into the main living space which let's heat flow to most of the house..it's only about 1700sq.ft. (I have a Toyotomi L73 direct vent right now in that spot...it does a great job and is really efficient but the cost of Kero this year is going to make me cry...still better than the crappy electric though)

May I drop you an email for a current price per ton if I decide to put together a bin in the basement?

NEPA Native wrote:May I drop you an email for a current price per ton if I decide to put together a bin in the basement?

Sure, I have a about a 2 -3 week wait right now.

I have this stove and like it very much. It is a quality product. The only two potential inconvenieces with this is that the top loading of rice is quite dusty. You might install a dust shroud on you hod for filling. The other thing to keep in mind is that the feed on the stove is a push-plate mechanism of stainless steel rather than a screw auger system. The clearance between the push plate and the body of the feed mechanism is very tight. If you have any stone or foreign debris in your coal it can get caught in between and bing it up. The feed is a high torque cam link to the motor and can seriously scratch and scar these plates. You are then required to dump all the coal out and unbind the siezed plate. Other than that, it is a marvelously simple stove. Dane Harman went though some serious problems with this type of model early on, but he got the kinks out and I would highly recommend it.

Iggy from Hampton, NJ

iggy3 wrote:The clearance between the push plate and the body of the feed mechanism is very tight. If you have any stone or foreign debris in your coal it can get caught in between and bing it up.

I've always reccomended to all my customers using a stoker to place a screen across the hopper. larger pieces of coal should not be in the rice but it is possible. They can come from a variety of places, one that was missed from previous load, the loader.... the loader is a prime cnaidate in the winter. Sometimes the lareger pieces will freeze to the bucket....

We do everthing we can to avoid this, they are few and far between but some pieces willl ineveitably make it into the smaller coal.

To Mr. Coalman aka Admin

I sent you an email yesterday and just wanted to drop a note in here as well. Looks like I'll be putting together a bin in the basement so I was just looking for a quote on 2.5-3 tons delivered to Taylor. Email address is ofhs93 (at) yahoo (dot) com

Thanks