I'm New, Good Descision?

 
Matthaus
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Post by Matthaus » Sun. Jul. 06, 2008 9:37 pm

traderfjp wrote:Try the thermostat you have first and see how it works. There are high and low settings for the Coaltrol that has to be tweaked depending on the weather too.
The Coal-Trol is a set and forget affair. No tweaking required unless you change coal suppliers. Once the min and max fire are set it doesn't matter if it is 100 out or -30 the Coal-Trol will regulate the stove with no intervention from the operator. A Coal-Trol can be added at any time, however on the Keystoker it takes a little more work since the stokewr, convection fan and combustion blower are hard wired :)

IMO you should use the Tstat for a season (don't worry you will be tweaking feed rates and trying to get the blower running the right speed for air distribution), that way you will appreciate the Coal-Trol when you buy one. ;)

On the subkect of location, it is hard to give advice without actually looking at the house, but unless the pipes might freeze you will use less coal to install it in the living space as has been suggested.

Keep us posted on your progress. :)

 
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traderfjp
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Post by traderfjp » Sun. Jul. 06, 2008 10:42 pm

Matthaus - I guess you have a Coaltrol and are a big fan. Are you using it to keep your home at a constant temp or are you using the set back feature? I only had mine for a week so...I found that the setback feature didn't work that well. If I set the thermostat to hit 69 at night and to go up to 74 in the morning the stove would over fire by ten degrees and we would be opening windows. It also took a few hours to get the Coaltrol to ramp up my fire. I tried for a solid week, with the help of the tech guys, but could never dial in the Coaltrol to work with my stove. When I tried setting the Coaltrol for a constant temp it worked as advertised. But in all fairness I never ran it long enough to have felt comfortable knowing that if the temps were 10 degrees outside or 48 degrees the Coaltrol would keep the house at a constant temp. I'd be intersted in hearing how you use the Coaltrol and how accurate it is for your setup. Since, in my family, we all leave in the morning I simply turn the stove down to idle and then when I get home I fire it higher to get the house up to temp. I would love to have a Coaltrol if it did this for me automatically but it seemed that its forte' was keeping the stove firing to maintain one temp. I would use way to much coal if I operated my stove at one temp. I do have to guess at times, how to adjust the feed rate, but I'm pretty good at doing this.

 
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Rob R.
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Post by Rob R. » Mon. Jul. 07, 2008 7:51 am

traderfjp wrote:Matthaus -If I set the thermostat to hit 69 at night and to go up to 74 in the morning the stove would over fire by ten degrees and we would be opening windows.
Where is your thermostat located in relation to the stove?


 
Matthaus
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Post by Matthaus » Mon. Jul. 07, 2008 8:09 am

traderfjp wrote:Matthaus - I guess you have a Coaltrol and are a big fan. Are you using it to keep your home at a constant temp or are you using the set back feature? I only had mine for a week so...I found that the setback feature didn't work that well. If I set the thermostat to hit 69 at night and to go up to 74 in the morning the stove would over fire by ten degrees and we would be opening windows. It also took a few hours to get the Coaltrol to ramp up my fire. I tried for a solid week, with the help of the tech guys, but could never dial in the Coaltrol to work with my stove. When I tried setting the Coaltrol for a constant temp it worked as advertised. But in all fairness I never ran it long enough to have felt comfortable knowing that if the temps were 10 degrees outside or 48 degrees the Coaltrol would keep the house at a constant temp. I'd be intersted in hearing how you use the Coaltrol and how accurate it is for your setup. Since, in my family, we all leave in the morning I simply turn the stove down to idle and then when I get home I fire it higher to get the house up to temp. I would love to have a Coaltrol if it did this for me automatically but it seemed that its forte' was keeping the stove firing to maintain one temp. I would use way to much coal if I operated my stove at one temp. I do have to guess at times, how to adjust the feed rate, but I'm pretty good at doing this.
I set mine at one temp and leave it the house stayed at +/- 1 *F. IMO You have very little to gain by using the setback feature as far as coal savings go. I did use the set back for a 5 degree change between night and day and experienced a 3 - 5 degree overshoot. You can eliminate that by setting the Tstat on min feed once the temp is reached though. then when the feed rate drops just switch back to auto (but in that scenario no change in setting is required). Also as Mark asked, the location of the Tstat does have some effect. As I said I feel it's better to leave the house at a constant temp and prevent all the wasted coal trying to heat it all up again. The solid fuel burning process is not suited to constant changing in the way that gas or electric heat are, but then at the cost savings why mess with it. :)

 
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ceccil
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Post by ceccil » Mon. Jul. 07, 2008 10:54 am

Must be I'm just lucky and have everything dialed in well. I only use a programable thermostat and it's set at 70' days and 65' at night. When it calls for heat to come up to 70' during the day, I only have an overshoot by 2'. Once up to temp. it holds within +/- 1' Can't complain about that. Short of getting the coaltrol dialed in I have heard nothing but good about them. :D

 
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traderfjp
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Post by traderfjp » Mon. Jul. 07, 2008 11:35 am

Hi,

The thermostat was roughly 15 ft. from the stove in the next room but it's an open floor plan. I disagree about having nothing to gain by lower my stove's feed rate. My wife likes to keep it really warm in our house. The room with the stove is kept at 78 degrees, the adjoining LV is probably 72 and the upstairs stays around 68-69. When I leave in the morning I don't want to keep the house as warm as my wife would like so I turn down the feedrate to about 1 which is idle. When I get home the room with the stove is about 70. I jackup the feedrate to 5 dump lots of coal on the grate for about 5 minutes and then I turn it back down to 2-3. So my stove is running on idle all day and then only gets ramped up around 4pm when my daughter gets home. This works well for us. LIke I said I had a hard time dialing in the Coaltrol. What I wouldn't mind doing is getting it again and using the constant temp setting for the night and then switch to manual when I get up in the morning. DO u know if there is a way to manually control the feed rate from the thermostat??


 
Matthaus
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Post by Matthaus » Mon. Jul. 07, 2008 12:18 pm

You can manually control the feed rate in the min and max settings of the setup menu. If you want to supply a large load of coal to the grate just go into the setup mode and then select max, this will feed at whatever your max rate is for as long as you leave it there. Likewise if you want to adjust the feedrate just change the setting when in either max or min, just don't foget what they were set on and also understand if you exceed the max you will dump burning coals off the grate and if you go under the min you could put the fire out. ;) If you think about it, the Coal-Trol can be operated just as easily as turning the dial on the Alaska manual feed rate controller.

Of course if you are not keeping the house as warm as the wife would like you are just asking for trouble! :lol: :lol:

 
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pclfal
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Post by pclfal » Wed. Jul. 16, 2008 8:26 am

Once again, I appreciate all the advise. I now have some other folks looking into Stokers and checking out this forum. I've been reading a lot here, and I think we are going to be very happy with our purchase.

Now to build a coal bin.

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