Size of your firebox, bed of coal

Greg, Excellent photo there.That gives me the idea. The best piece of info though was keeping the air supply going thru the coal and not around it. Thank you very much.I'm lovin this site!!

Also some basics I've learned since the first post in this thread:

The time of burn or duration of burn is determined by the depth of the coal bed. My coal bed burns about an inch an hour, more in cold weather.

The area of the coal bed deterimines the BTUs of the fire.

Coal has a peak-heat burn time and then a glowing-ember burn time. A good stoker will get the most heat from this peak burn time, and the embers are then dropped into the ash pan.

A hand load fire has several inches of embers under the coal bed. These embers soon become ash and if the grate is designed right will fall through the grate into the ash pan. Or they have to get forced into the ash pan by shaking the grate.

Greg L

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Greg - I know this thread is pretty old, but I find I'm asking the same question you did a few years ago. With Bit. coal, I get tremendous heat for the first few hours (from the yellow flames), and then the heat drops off quite a bit with the blue flames. I would have expected more heat from the blue flames.

It makes it hard to keep the heat even in the house with my homemade hand-fed. Would like to tone the yellow flames down. They get the stove over 700* in a hurry.

This weekend, I figured out a way to add 4-1/2" of depth (firebrick width) to the load door opening. The results make me think that a 9" deep bed burns significantly different than a 4-1/2" deep bed. Not just burn time.

What in the end did you figure was the answer to your question?

Steinke

I found that the deeper the fire the better it burnt, but with Bitum coal, I had lots of ash, and lots of clinker [fused, melted ash] This clogged my grates after a few days, required either some digging and pulling/removing of large clinkers, or letting the fire go out and cleaning off the grates. Then starting a fresh fire.

a deeper fire will burn longer, I'd give it a try, and see what your results are with your Wyoming Bitum coal. It has a lot different characteristics than the West Virginia coal I was burning.

Greg L