Chronicles of the Clayton

So it appears so far you've saved about 40 bucks this Dec., compared to 2014? That gives you an extra few tanks of gas, so go out and have a cruise Lee.
(TOTP )

Thanks Joe, I enjoyed my free fill up Also I just noticed that coincidently I used 1209 pounds for November and exactly 1209 pounds for December. How weird is that? Although December had one more day than November which brought daily average down to 39 pounds per day. November's daily average was 40.3 pounds.

It seems ole man winter has finally arrived, so yous guys can "crank her up", and start running the way these devices are meant to be run. Enjoy.

Right dead center of winter. I'm cooking burgers on the grill out on the front porch and 51 degrees today. Unbelievable. Will be tending on 24 hours for the next 4 days at least. Stove is idling at 225 over the load door. Nice winter

THIS WINTER SUCKS!

This keeps up, this will become an "Air conditioner" forum! LOL...

coal nut wrote:THIS WINTER SUCKS!

This keeps up, this will become an "Air conditioner" forum! LOL...

Right but look at all the coal you'll have left over for next year lol.

Hey fellas! I added some more bling to my monitoring station. The red LED on the left measures the temperature coming off the top side of the water coil going to the top of the temper tank for domestic hot water.

The red LED on the right measures temperature of the warm air supply right off the top of the furnace.

I bought both LED displays and a 12 volt DC power supply for under $25 on ebay.

I attempted to shade the displays with foil tape since the light above seemed to wash them out a bit.

are you SURE these are pics from your house and not those you're pirating from down at the local power plant ?

3 yrs. ago, after heating with coal exclusively for 25 yrs, when I bought my first manometer and MPD I thought I was moving into "space shot" technology.

i now have a hanging scale, dedicated ash vac, individual logs for various info. and not even starting to keep up with the stuff needed to burn coal these days.

real nice display and monitoring station though,

steve

Hahaha, too funny! Thank you for the kind words

The only things I'm missing are a couple LED lights. I'd like one to come on when the thermostat is making a heat call and another to tell me when the blowers are on.

"Beam me up Scotty!"

How the over the fire air tubes are working , I mean what is your opinion about it?
If you didn't installed them a few time ago, would you install the same over the fire air tubes knowing the results you had with them? An other way to ask: what is the degre of satisfaction you got from the modif.?
Not really easy to explain my question but hope you can see it.
Thanks from the warm North

nortcan wrote:How the over the fire air tubes are working , I mean what is your opinion about it?
If you didn't installed them a few time ago, would you install the same over the fire air tubes knowing the results you had with them? An other way to ask: what is the degre of satisfaction you got from the modif.?
Not really easy to explain my question but hope you can see it.
Thanks from the warm North

HI Nortcan! Always a pleasure to hear from you.. I understand your question. You ask "Would I do it again on my next stove?". The answer is Yes, but I would like to try something different. What I would like to do is run the pipes thru the coal bed somehow to preheat the secondary air, OR possibly run a square channel horizontally between firebricks then channel the air upward to come out at the top of the bricks.

So far my findings with secondary air is that it's only beneficial for hydrocarbon volatile gas burning during the first couple of hours after a fresh load of coal has been put in the stove. Below is data I collected from a couple weeks ago during mid burn (about 12 hours after loading) with a moderate burn rate using stove size coal.. By this time most hydrocarbons have baked out of the coal. What I was looking for is some truth to the burning of carbon monoxide to produce more heat, but so far that has been unsuccessful. Test was done with steady -.03 of draft, primary air was kept the same thru the duration.

Pipe = flue pipe temp (measured on top of the pipe about 24 inches from breech)
stove = over the load door temp
con = convection air temp (warm air supply)
sec = amount of secondary air provided by distribution tubes
time = current time after change of secondary air

Pipe - stove - con - sec - time
205 --- 331 -- 113 --- 50% - 5:43
192 --- 334 -- 113 --- 10% - 6:09
212 --- 318 -- 111 --100% - 6:42
189 --- 329 -- 113 --- 10% - 7:06

So, at 5:43 I cut secondary air from 50% to 10% and observed the temp changes at 6:09
Pipe temp dropped 13 degrees
stove temp rose 3 degrees
no change of convection air temp

At 6:09 I opened the secondary air from 10% to 100% and observed temp changes at 6:42
Pipe temp rose 20 degrees
Stove temp fell 16 degrees
Convection air lost 2 degrees

Then at 6:42 I changed it back to 10% secondary air just to see if it would come back to where it was at 6:09. Then at 7:06 I saw that it came back pretty darn close.

So, what I've concluded from this is that Stove coal burns pretty complete with just primary air and doesn't produce much unburned carbon monoxide. If in fact it does, then it must be that primary air oxygen that goes up thru the fuel bed unused could be burning any CO when it comes out on top. I don't know what else to think of it.

You mentioned "stove coal" as your test bed Lee. Will you try it again, but with nut coal? Or a mix? Nice job, bye the way. You know we're gunna call you "professor".

I'm for the proff. mention, .
Thank you very much to take the time for the nice explanations. Always good to have real answers.

nortcan wrote:I'm for the proff. mention, .
Thank you very much to take the time for the nice explanations. Always good to have real answers.

No Problem nortcan

joeq wrote:You mentioned "stove coal" as your test bed Lee. Will you try it again, but with nut coal? Or a mix? Nice job, bye the way. You know we're gunna call you "professor".

Yes, I will try the test a couple more times thru this season with different variables.

So, I did the total for Jan 2016. Burned 1947 pounds for 62.8 pounds per day average in Jan. Last January (2015) I used exactly 2200 pounds. This Jan (2016) is down 253 pounds.

I've also done a couple more coal/ash comparisons. One in mid Jan of 18.5% and another at the end of Jan of 16.6%. The high percentage was due to running a few loads of small pieces and fines, they tend to fall thru on the shake down. Lava in the ash pan

Very pleased with the thermostatically controlled primary air.
Here's more on that subject,
Thermostatically Controlled Actuator for Combustion Air