efm Bituminous boiler testing is next week

Contact TR at Rocky Mountain Hydronics.

stoker-man wrote:That is the website and email address to inquire about these. There is no pricing yet or availability because we are going to test for awhile. Every other day I'll post some more pictures. TR will be handling these units in the entire Western US. Outside of his territory, we might handle them.


http://www.rockymountainhydronics.com/

sales@rockymountainhydronics.com

What a fine looking website that is, really pro.

Yeah, I forgot about that Richard. We've heard many compliments about it. I wonder if Joe knows that his store name is on utube? I hope he doesn't get any calls.

hi , that electric boiler looks interesting. i have hydo baseboard heaters in a 1,200 sf house. whats sometime like that cost and the cost to run it in the winter? could i get buy with one unit? just wondering , thank you

Electric boilers are used widely to heat houses where electricity is cheap. Even in PA, with electric at 10 Cents per KWH, they are popular. Call efm or TR for more info.

There were some suggestions in this thread about adding "over-the-fire-air" to this unit to reduce smoking. The stoker had been installed into an efm boiler in the small town where the test was done and run for a short time. There were no problems at the time except that nobody is used to the odor of soft coal burning. With high humidity and temperatures and a compact town, the odor was that of a (house) fire, so to end the confusion, the test was taken out of town.

Although the test on the farm was done with abundant air over the fire, the stoker also did well when installed into a boiler.

perfect....

Lets go!

Ill be a Beta test site

Some of the details about the initial experiment:

The test firing used six, five gallon buckets of Wyoming soft coal, and the ash resultant was 1/2 of an ash bin. The air chamber was for the 200,000 BTU output stoker, but only a used 100,000 BTU pot was available. The maximum setting of coal feed was 5 teeth; about half the capacity of an efm stoker, without pushing coal over the top of the ring. The air setting was 8. The test stoker was unplugged at 10 pm and left to sit overnight unattended. At 7 am the next morning, it was plugged in again and the fire took off without the need of a Wil-burt timer. So, it held fire for 9 hours without any feed or air.

When the stoker was installed into an efm boiler, the resultant smoke in the chimney was the same as seen in the video; a small amount of white smoke. There was no need for any supplemental over-the-fire-air.

The best set-up was found to be the use of the S-20 efm stoker, with a Prill pot, and a 2 1/2" worm and pipe. This solved the problem of the various sizes of coal, as it is available in Wyoming, called stoker coal.

stoker-man wrote:There were no problems at the time except that nobody is used to the odor of soft coal burning.

Odor? Bit-a-phobes! Remind me not to send you any water.

stoker-man wrote:Some of the details about the initial experiment:
The test produced 100K of heat.

How did you measure the amount of heat produced?

How did you measure the amount of heat produced?

Fair enough. We'll let the lab do that.

The test efm boiler had a known quantity of anthacite used to produce a certain water temperature in a certain amount of time and the soft coal produced the same effect.

As for the odor, when you live in an area where everybody heats with anthracite, you'll notice it.

stoker-man wrote:As for the odor, when you live in an area where everybody heats with anthracite, you'll notice it.

My nearest neighbor is about 1000 feet away and he heats with bit coal and I can smell it. Heck when I was a kid a lot of people around hear still heated with bit and the entire neighborhood smelled like that. And the snow in the yard always had a black dusting on it.

http://www.youtube.com/MarksSupply

I didn't get any text with this video, but I had asked Joe to get a picture after the stoker had run for awhile and developed a good ash ring. It appears that everything is burning up, with no clinkers in the ash pit. The nice ash ring is seen when the stoker is shut down. The smoke that appears to be coming up from the ash pit is actually the grass on fire under the base.

We'll be testing some western PA coal as soon as we can get it up there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAQaAaOIs7Q

The above link is the last posting of the testing. The ideal settings seems to be 4 feed and 6 air without wasting any coal. In this video, the stoker was shut down for 5 hours with no maintenance and restarted. The black pieces around the edge appear to be unburned coal, but are actually ash. The ash is of a powder consistency. This is the end of the testing of Wyoming coal.

Went up to the test site today. The Wyoming coal burns beautifully, with no waste and with firewood-like ash. Little to no smoke. We don't see any reason for further burn tests.

Also burned some soft coal from the Phillipsburg, PA area. There are several types available there and I don't remember which type it was. The coal is so soft that it was at least 50% dust in the bucket, yet there weren't any issues with feeding it, or smoking, but since it's much harder to blow air through a pile of dust, it was very slow burning, but also very hot. There was some clinkering and the infed coal tended to push the clinker above the grate. As the ring turned, it would push the unburned clinker off the edge. Joe will work on a higher rim for the pot with some pins to break up the clinkers. The clinkers were easily broken and certainly not rock-like at all. This experiment will continue.