coal stove suggestions

First a confession. I am a wood burner in a super insulated home. 24k btu max/hour. In a woodstock woodstove we heat with a max of 2 1/2 cords of wood. I want to switch to coal with a dhw coil. What would you suggest. I live just outside of Manchester NH so coal suppliers would be appreciated as well.

Jim

Wow, for that low a BTU output you won't be pushing even a small stove very hard. A Harman Mark I like I have claims 48,000 BTU and realistically it probably can do about 38,000 in my estimation, so it could easily handle your peak load. But a domestic HW coil is not an option. The bigger Harman Mark II has a coil available but might be too much heat for you. I don't know how many BTUs the coil soaks up.

Two things to think about:
(1) As I'm sure you know from your wood stove, with a super-tight house you probably need an outside source of combustion air.
(2) Since your coal stove will be idling at low output for much of the time, the chimney won't be getting very hot (a coal flue is much cooler than with wood, typically). So maintaining draft could be iffy in warmer weather. A chimney that runs inside the house would be ideal so it will stay warmer. I never thought much about the chimney when I was burning wood, because of the high flue temps, but I find it is more of an issue with coal.

Beyond that, I don't know what to suggest for specific stoves. Hopefully someone else here has experience with an appropriate model. Too bad you can't bottle the excess heat and sell it to your neighbors.

Be sure to post what you finally find for a stove -- it's an unusual problem you have, finding one small enough.

One of the "peace" offerings I will giving my wife is a solar hot water heater sized to partially heat the house. I might stick with wood but there are alot of things that attract me to coal. I cannot put a dhw loop in a wood stove and pass EPA requirements.

I do have an internal 6" flue so things are half set already.

Jim

I have no experience with stokers, other than what I have read on this forum, but it's my understanding that because they have a combustion blower and sometimes a power vent, they can put out high heat but also can be throttled down to very low output levels. Some people apparently continue to use them all summer for domestic hot water heating. But probably those are true boilers, whereas what you seem to need is a non-boiler that heats like a wood stove but has the bonus of a hot water coil.