Buckwheat in the Keystoker 90!

DENNIS BAUER · Post by **DENNIS BAUER** » Tue. Jan. 20, 2015 8:16 am

titleist1 wrote:Dennis....I just had a thought regarding your buck coal sliding issue. Did you check to make sure your stoker is level front to back? If it is 'leaning' a little forward maybe that is enough to change the angle of the grates and cause the coal to slide off?

It's never been moved since I bought the house. I just went through and did some cleaning on it that I learned from here. I will check the level tonight on it when I get home from work.

EarthWindandFire · Post by **EarthWindandFire** » Tue. Jan. 20, 2015 8:45 am

I agree that BUCK is better than RICE in many ways. However, I will caution you that it causes blockages in the hopper throat. For example, I was home on vacation back in December when I came back from the store and saw no orange glow in the stove window. Long story short, but the cause was a piece of BUCK the size of a chicken egg blocking the coal from feeding onto the grate. This actually happened to me twice that day. Also, every bag of BUCK contained huge chunks of coal and tons of sticks. I have since been forced back to RICE due to these issues.

ytseman3 · Post by **ytseman3** » Tue. Jan. 20, 2015 9:42 am

I didn't see any big chunks of coal but there were small pieces of sticks. I had the sticks with the rice from the same mine (jeddo). The blaschak has no sticks. I would get blaschak buck however my blaschak supplier doesn't carry buck. The jeddo buck is from a different supplier.

Post by **Rob R.** » Tue. Jan. 20, 2015 11:30 am

EarthWindandFire wrote:Long story short, but the cause was a piece of BUCK the size of a chicken egg blocking the coal from feeding onto the grate. This actually happened to me twice that day. Also, every bag of BUCK contained huge chunks of coal and tons of sticks. I have since been forced back to RICE due to these issues.

The issues you described are a coal quality problem in general, not due to the requested size. If it was the size of a chicken egg, then it wasn't buck....it was nut coal, and the buck you got was contaminated with it. That can happen with rice also.

EarthWindandFire · Post by **EarthWindandFire** » Tue. Jan. 20, 2015 12:05 pm

The buck in question was from Blaschak's. I have a coffee can full of pieces I saved. Some were the size of a chicken egg and some were thin but over 4 inches in length.

ytseman3 · Post by **ytseman3** » Tue. Jan. 20, 2015 5:41 pm

EarthWindandFire wrote:The buck in question was from Blaschak's. I have a coffee can full of pieces I saved. Some were the size of a chicken egg and some were thin but over 4 inches in length.

I wonder if the size mix happened at your supplier, I haven't found one wood stick in my blaschak rice yet.. some of the coal does seem a little big for rice but it could be just the way theirs is. It's not buck sized but somewhere between rice and buck. It seems a little bigger mix than the Jeddo rice I had last year.

ryanchamp10105 · Post by **ryanchamp10105** » Wed. Jan. 21, 2015 6:13 pm

i have a keystoker 90 and ordered a ton of rice coal but the guy tried to pull a fast one on me and delivered me a ton of buck.my stove sidewall temp was 500 to 550 which I need in upstate ny, when I tried the bigger buckwheat coal I only got the side of the stove to run around 410 and thats wide open.Just to be sure I emptied the hopper and I had a half of bag of rice coal left , I threw it in the hopper and in 30 minutes or so I was right back up to 500 degrees .

ytseman3 · Post by **ytseman3** » Wed. Jan. 21, 2015 6:26 pm

Did you increase your feed rate for the buck? The larger size required about 2-3 turns in to get the heat output of my rice.