EFM DF520 Door Needed

Hello Folks it has been a while.
Survived another winter.
5 ton of anthracite rice and one ton of pellets in our energy king wood coal / ka6 conversion and englander pellet stove.

Ran into an boiler section of an EFM 520 DF square door model. No bottom, no stoker , no doors. The domestic coil area is rusted thru. I have not cut it out yet to check the inside.
Anybody has a ( cheap) door laying around?
I probably will have to make my own bottom frame since I would like to make this not only a coal stoker but also experiment with wood chips ( different burner).
Photo's will follow.

Thanks J

It sounds like you are in for an interesting summer project Joe! I came accross the oposite EFM, an S20 stoker with on boiler or base.

Lets see some pic's!

-Don

Here is picture of the thru rot around the domestic hot water coil.
Don did I understand that you have a base for this unit?

Here is another picture from the inside.
I wonder how they made the fins. It would be cool to make a water cooled door with fins to gain some square area and efficiency.

I need to make a base with an extra large particle catch as will try to burn wood chips as well.

later J

Sorry Joe, I miss spelled "NO" in my earlier post. the only thing I got was the S20 stoker, no base no boiler.

That boiler you have there don't look to bad. Scott has one that looked something like that and he is heating his house and DHW with it now.

You need to figure out if you want to use the domestic coil or an indirect water heater. If you go with an indirect, you only need to weld a big plate over the coil area after you cut out all the rot. If you want to use the coil, it's a little more expensive.

The base is easy to make. My new base will be made out of simple concreate blocks and mortar with some angle iron. Most of the guys that refurb EFM's will sell you a refurbed stoker. Or you could hunt one down yourself like I did. You don't have to put an EFM back in it, any good stoker will work as long as it has enough heating capacity for your home.

-Don

Hi Don,

It was my mistake,... when I was reading your other post I understood what you had. Looks like a great project. I have several underfeed stoker mechanism that I can adapt to the EFM but probably looking into a flatbed since they are more universal.

At this moment (in winter) we use a converted energy king wood / coal boiler and adapted a flatbed stoker to it. Added a couple of baffles and reflectors to increase the efficiency. Early in the season I burn the scrap wood that is laying around and that I want to get rid of. When the temperatures get consistently low then I hang the stoker in it and burn coal.

I run at low boiler temperatures 140 F and have adjusted the coal feed so that it runs almost non stop on a very low fire. The heat of small fire is more easily absorbed in the water and as a result the stack temperature is very low. If the water temperature goes above 145 then the timer sets the stoker at 1 minute run 20 seconds off. That should be improved. The short cycle damages the motor start switch. I have a DC servo motor that I will adapt to the stoker mechanism so that I can adapt the speed and thus the feed rate / airflow and so I would be able to control the water temp way better. Also the DC motor is far more efficient then the existing motors. I use the concrete floor with PEX heat of the Barn as a dump load above 150 F in case something happens to the primary circulator. The primary circulator ( taco 007) runs non stop.
The boiler system is set up in the Barn. I have a magic hat in the flue that prevents the barn form freezing.
The heat gets piped with underground Rehau 1.5" pex to he house. The house (1910) has 3/4 pex under wooden floor heating and also a double wall 50 gallon water heater for domestic. In the basement a second oil boiler is in parallel . It is converted to burn Waste vegetable oil. It works good but the air nozzle needs cleaning every 10 days. Coal is easier and cheaper with the current price of WVO. So it is in standby mode. We have not used it the last two years.

Floor heat is great, The kids and dog love it. For seeing some flames we have the smallest englander pellet stove. That also heats the house from 68 to 74 when you feel hat you have to escape the cold.



I like to experiment with wood chips as an alternate fuel and think that the 520 is very easy to clean out.
The Burnham wvo boiler in the basement is from 1958. It is a wet base cast iron boiler that I wanted to convert to coal at some moment, hence the collection of underfed stokers. At some moment the 520 an take it place.

Later J

The 520 plate boiler looks like it has a lot of surface area inside to absorb the heat from the burner. It will work well for your experiment.

Sounds like you are no stranger to science projects! Please post pics, I would love to see how this works out.

The funny thing about that boiler you have, and the Losch boiler I have is that all that rust is on the outside! And was caused by the DHW coil gasket leaking. I will likely weld a plate over mine.

-Don