Tip Fof the Van Wert and EFM During Power Outage

Just had a power outage for 24 hours.... Never really had the opportunity to try this before in my life becsue in town we never had long power outages and the opportunity never presented itself here in the new house. The Van Wert will easily go 4 or 5 hours with no power but once you get past that 6 hour mark you are pushing it. I guess it also largely depends on when it loses power. We have a generator but running that sucker all night especially in the summer is a giant waste and a little annoying too

We're backfeeding the power so I wanted to turn the main breaker back on in case the power came back on during the night. One of the problems here is if the boiler goes out and the power comes back on I'm going to have 400 pounds of unburned coal in the boiler. So I shut the generator and boiler off about 10 pm and switched the main breaker back on. I shoveled on about 4 good coal shovels, be about 8 or 10 pounds I would guess. Water temp was around 160, 8 hours later in the morning it's up to 180 and I still have really nice fire going. If I had to guess it still had another 6 hours to go and there was room for more coal.

The other thing is the Van Wert has a draft setting on it and I probably could have lowered this and got even a longer burn out of it. My guess is I could probably keep it going with no power for at least 2 days just with shoveling a little bit of coal on it. You're not going to heat the house in the middle of winter but at least you don't have to relight it.

I'm sure the EFM is going to be similar.

Yes the EFM is similar, except the EFM has a hand crank. Give it a couple turns every couple hours and its good to go.

Well I could throw wrench on the one auger shaft and but that's going to take a while to get enough a coal in it.

plumber wrote:Yes the EFM is similar, except the EFM has a hand crank. Give it a couple turns every couple hours and its good to go.

Does the hand crank manually blow air into the burnpot? Is that what I'm understanding?

I know the efm will go hours without power so it's getting air from somewhere, I'm assuming it has draft like the Van Wert except it's not adjustable? You're not going to heat the house doing this at least to a high temperature, the only thing you are really doing here is keeping it lit.

NJJoe wrote:

plumber wrote:Yes the EFM is similar, except the EFM has a hand crank. Give it a couple turns every couple hours and its good to go.

Does the hand crank manually blow air into the burnpot?

No, it simply turns the auger and adds coal to the pot. The natural draft from the chimney is what keeps the coal burning. The air is drawn through the blower housing and up through the burn pot...and also the burning coal.

Good to know. Thanks.