My Combustioneer Journey

Well, she's crankin'! Been burning about an hour and flue pipe surface temp directly at the outletis just a shade over 200*F. Ain't too sure about this wet coal from Greenbrier Smokeless. I've got some pretty wild coke trees growing right now.

Anyway, question time, does the attached photo show a healthy fire or one receiving too much air? The manual is good but I'm a dipstick.

I don't know the first thing about Bit coal but, wow! Glad to see you have it fired!

Hopefuly someone else will be along that knows how to cut down coke trees.

-Don

It ran for about 3.5 to 4 hours last night before I had to shut it down for multiple issues.

First, it wasn't feeding enough coal to prevent burning too far down into the pot with the belt set on the smallest pulley on the motor. I moved it to the middle pulley but didn't run long enough to get it tuned.

Second, it appears the motor output shaft is bent. It's noisy and, if I adjust the motor downwards, the blower wheel actually contacts the blower wheel housing.

Third, I apparently have a blockage at the throat of the hopper as it stopped feeding. The auger was turning and the shear pin is intact. Note that my coal is more or less ROM but it's so stinkin' small that I figured I'd be ok if I watched for oversized pieces. Apparently I either missed something or the fines are caking. Whichever is the case, I had no success running a roof bolt through the hopper in several places.

Grrr.

After 3 hours of burning (which raised the house temperature by almost 10 degrees), my firebox was nearly completely full of a huge mass of burning coke. I shut her down for a couple of hours to burn down the coke, closed the combustion air inlet about a quarter turn, and let it burn for another hour. After this hour, again I had a gigantic ball of coke. The coke was still glowing faintly 6 hours later.

For now, it's off as I'm at work. I don't know if I'll get to play with it this evening.

In any case, is there anything different I can do? This coal is trash - loaded with fines and I have to sort chunks of slate out as I'm filling the hopper. I don't even know what direction to go. Will more combustion air help?

Sorry to hear about all the grief you're having with this. Coal quality and size are the main problems here.

The less fine coal the better...For this type of furnace you want coal ranging from about 1/2 in to 1 inch in size with no more than 25% fines.

Coal that is wet with lots of fines can bridge over in the hopper keeping coal from reaching the auger.

I've never had issues with coke trees in my furnace because the coal here in Utah doesn't have that characteristic so I don't have any experience with that...sorry.

I would try swapping the motor with the one from the other stove to see if that fixes the noise problem.

To burn the coke down you need to use the neutral position on the gearbox. To do that you need to loosen the hand wheel where the shear pin is and pull the shear pin assembly back and let it run for no longer than 5 minutes. If you run it like that for longer then that you run the risk of having smoke come out the hopper an damaging the firepot.

Will-burt will Email you a owners manual if you contact them.

As for the noise what kind of noise is it? Scraping? Squeaking? There is only so much adjustment up an down, cause of the way the fan shroud is made.

Here ya go, Enjoy, Merry Christmas

Less air, only remove loose ash, let the coke build, move to the lowest pulley setting. You want longer cycles.

Wet coal with lots of fines gets you big coke trees and outfires/burnpot damage from the coal bridging the worm and failing to feed. Dry coal with lots of fines just gets you coke trees.

You won't be able to find the natural feed rate of the coal you're using unless it's fairly dry. Coal with that many fines that's wet won't feed or will do so intermittently causing difficulty in setting the air properly.

Wow, lots of high quality replies for which I never received a notification email. Sorry about that.

First, I hope everyone had a good Christmas.

Now onto comments and questions:

I know either the motor shaft or the fan pulley is bent as I can watch it wobble when I removed the belt and turned it by hand.

My coal is damp. I need a bin. It showed up wet and my eldest boy, who usually is tasked with getting coal, left the tarp off it for about a week. Just was told about that Christmas day. Any feasible way to dry this stuff?

Putting the transmission in its neutral position is exactly how I burned the coke off. After about 5 or 7 minutes of forced induction, the center of the coke ball was WHITE! After this discovery, I shut everything down and the coke reduced itself to ashes within 3 hours.

I'm going to try to get a ton of stoker sized bit from the same place I'm getting trashy 'house coal' as I've a friend who uses it in a crane syoker. He's pleased with the quality and cleanliness of this.

Hopefully, I'll give it another go next week. Thanks, as always.

McGiever, I actually spoke with Dan at Will-burt to get my manual. He mentioned that they're not going to sell stokers or parts and referred me to another company. I'll post the email when I find it.

As promised earlier, below is the email sent to me by Dan with Will-burt.

As requested, attached here are the owner’s manuals for “Combustioneer” heater models 77B and 77L9. These are the two self-contained, bituminous coal burning stoker fired space heaters that The Will-Burt Company produced for many, many years.

Please note the following…

· Will-Burt discontinued the manufacture and sale of new 77B heaters in the late 1980’s, approximately.

· Will-Burt discontinued the manufacture and sale of new 77L9 heaters in the mid 1990’s, approximately.

· With the exception of a few obsolete items, Will-Burt sold replacement service parts for both of those heaters up through the early part of 2014.

· As of the middle of 2014, the rights to the Will-Burt heating product line were sold to JonMar Gear & Machine Inc. in Canal Fulton, OH. Their contact information is listed below. Future requests for heating product information, parts, availability, etc. should be directed to them.



Thank you,

Dan Wesman

The Will-Burt Company

Orrville, OH





JonMar Gear & Machine Inc.

13786 Warwick Drive NW

Canal Fulton, OH 44614-9738

330-854-6500

Fax 330-854-6566

I just got a ton of stoker delivered today. Haven't been home to see it yet. My better half says there's a good bit of fines but I'm more worried about the moisture.

Anyone have a workable way to remove excess moisture from coal? I have no idea how yhis stuff was stored before receipt.

voodoochylde wrote:I just got a ton of stoker delivered today. Haven't been home to see it yet. My better half says there's a good bit of fines but I'm more worried about the moisture.

Anyone have a workable way to remove excess moisture from coal? I have no idea how yhis stuff was stored before receipt.

Bury a perforated 4" PVC pipe in the coal pile with end(s) exposed and use a blower fan to move some air.

Necro-post! I didn't think it'd be proper to have multiple threads for one build so I'll resurrect this one.

I'm in the thick of my variable frequency drive conversion. I'm using a GS1 drive rated for 1/2hp and a 1/3hp 3 phase Ironhorse motor. Both were purchased from http://www.automationdirect.com. I'm divorcing the stoker motor from the blower. For now, the plan is to use a Dayton 1TDP7 blower rated for 146cfm at 0 inches of static pressure. To slow it down, I'm going to *try* using a KB Electronics KBWC-16K. I say I'm going to try to use it because it doesn't change the frequency of the motor voltage and only decreases impressed power to increase slip. If the blower were free-air, the speed control would have very little control as there would be almost nothing to force the motor to slip. The final modification for now is the replacement of the distribution blower control and the stock high limit switch with a Honeywell L4064B2236 combination limit and blower control.

As of now, I have a prototype motor mounting plate made from OSB. The motor is mounted and aligned. The VFD is mounted but I can't decide whether to enclose it or not. I have powered the stoker motor and VFD up and got the speed to ramp from a high of 1750rpm to a low of 66rpm (holy crap!) but I don't have the transmission in right now.

I discovered the source of my transmission leak - one of those cute caps is still weeping. I guess my only fix is to drill a hole through the center of the cap so I can use a machine screw to draw it to the transmission and compress the seal. RTV will also be lending a hand.

It's a rat's nest and I haven't taken any photos yet. I'll get some soon.