What's the Lifespan of My Keystoker

i bought this stove this fall off of craigslist I paid $800. its a keystoker 90K stove, it has been wonderful so far, no major issues and no breakdowns..... very reliable so far. I called keystoker and they said the stove was produced in april of 2006 so its roughly 10 years old. things im going to so before next winter.... rebuild the knobs. the threads are stripped out in the bottom knob and the wooden handle fell of so I have been using the vise-grips to open and close that door. the top door handle slips a little where the shaft goes into the handle so that will be fixed as well. otherwise its been a trouble fee stove. so how long can I expect this stove to last? what wears out on them besides the obvious. I was reading one of the threads on rust, do these units rust out to the point of being junk and un-useable? how do you know when you have reached that point. I am hoping to keep this unit as long as possible, I know motors well eventually need replacement. I know someone that had a hopped on a Harman mag stoker and rotted out and had to be replaced, is that common for all stoves? will this stove last another 10-15 years or more? also I know something about the combustion blower needing oil at the end of the season, where do I oil the motor?

Remember it is a steel box. The wall thickness should be able to be measured say where the stoker passes through the back of the stove. You should be able to see if rust or corrosion has "necked" down the metal showing loss. The motors are bolt on, easily replaceable. The stoker grate area is cast iron, and the grates are replaceable. Unless this thing was abused beyond belief 20 more years should not be out of the question. Keystoker has been around since 1946 and that is by no accident.

My Parents bought their K-90 back in 1987 and is going strong. With proper maintenance at shut down every summer and tightening the handle screws as well as keeping them lubed you should have no trouble going another 30 years. By then you'll get the bug to buy another model like a koker.

hopefully the government doesnt do something stupid like ban coal home heating. hopefully keystoker is still in business in another 20 or 30 years so I can buy a brand new stove. after trying different home heating methods coal is my ultimate solution. I do not think I can do any better. this thing is efficient, economical, and provides great heating value. even when it was -10 one night the house WAS still 68 degrees which is what the wall thermostat was programmed for. I never managed to do that with any other source of heat. my home is only 1,600 sq ft or so but the house is a very old 1895 plank construction farm house. we replaced all of the windows since we lived here, gutted the old horsehair plaster (which was starting to crumble) and insulated the narrow walls as much as possible. we added some insulation to the attic as well. I might eventually install some storm doors (we did replace the doors themselves but we don't have storm doors) beyond that im really not going to spend any more money on insulation, it is what it is (an old home). im a broke blue collar middle class slave (if there is such a thing as middle class anymore). I need the hottest most economical source of heat on planet earth. truthfully coal really works in an old home such as mine, its probably not the first time this house has seen coal heating. coal heating was popular in the era before homes really got sealed well. to heat this house with natural gas im sure would be $300+ monthly. I never went that route (i have natural gas but don't heat with it, that is making utility companies richer). I tried the woods pellet what a mistake that was, coal is less hauling product around, much less work, and believe it or not not as dusty and pellets are no longer economical at $240. they are selling at the same price per ton as coal YET it takes about 1.6 times as much product for the same heat. 4 tons of coal equals roughly 6.4 tons of pellets. its really 7 tons because you buy pellets per ton usually. in other words a savings of $700 per season, not a small number
coal is the best source of heat for people on fixed incomes.

Stokers by nature are very robust. There are enough 60 and 70 year olds out there running to prove that. If well maintained, it should easily outlast its owner.

I;ve had mine for over 10 years, clean and lube it every spring, only replace the combustion blower, had a spare, then got the original going again, the shaft was dirty and seized up, cleaned and lubed it up and been working fine ever since. runs typcially runs nov-april 24/7.

coaledsweat wrote:Stokers by nature are very robust. There are enough 60 and 70 year olds out there running to prove that. If well maintained, it should easily outlast its owner.

i didnt know they even had stokers 60-70 years ago, I thought they were all hand fed. at any rate think about how many high efficiency gas furances you would have to buy and replace in that time frame. I am 34 years old so I could live another 50+ years who knows. if this was the only heater I ever had to buy I would be pretty pleased. when I buy something I usually try to buy the most durable product I can, weather its old I don't care. I remove all of the snow out of my driveway and mow my a acre lawn with a 1948 farmall cub. when I buy something I try to buy it for the long haul. I do not like buying disposable products again and again. if a stoker can live that long that's a hell of a deal.

We have members with stokers built in the '40s and '50s still buzzing along with no sign of giving up.

are those units like the old iron fireman that I have seen around? they have outlasted the companies that produced them

Yes, those and Axemans are very common. I'm not sure when the EFMs came out but they are plentiful in their old age too. The key is keeping it maintained and if you don't run it in the summer, keep it dry. They last longer if they stay running because they won't rust when hot. Idle time is what eats them up, they get damp and rust.

my stove is used and already has some rust on the inside although I don't really think its bad it is none the less a little rusty on the inside. I repainted the outside and it cleaned up nice, but the inside I really didnt do much with. when spring comes and I am completely done heating I will vacuum the stove out thoroughly and stuff a plastic bag inside the flue so it doesn't get moisture from the chimney. I probably also will remove the hopper clean up on the inside and repaint the inside of the hopper. I also have to rebuild the upper and lower handles. the glass is also filthy even after I tried to clean it up this fall. its so black and etched I might just replace it. not sure what replacement glass costs. I cant see the fire its so bad.

ad356,

It sounds like you got a good deal on a Keystoker that new. Hope it works great for you.

I once owned a home with a Keystoker, a Ka6, I think. I was told it was an early 1960's model. I used it from 1997 to 2001. A plumber/HVAC man that I trusted told me that the boiler had a leak. I replaced it with an oil boiler. So that one went somewhere between 35 and 40 years. Many are still in service that are older than that. I did shut it down once a year for up to two weeks. It's hard to ever leave home for long without someone to tend the boiler.

The only thing I didn't love on the Keystoker, was the down tilting grates. It was sometimes fun to start a fire and keep it on the grates long enough to ignite coal. I pretty much got the touch down. Previously I lived in a house for twenty years, with an even older Bair-omatic stoker boiler. Very simple, with flat shaker grates and loads of asbestos. That one also developed a boiler leak after about 40 or more years of hard service. That also got switched to an oil boiler.

Hope you enjoy the unit for many years.

why did you replace a coal unit with oil?? seems to me like coal would be far more economical and I would replace coal with another coal. was it simply the ability to leave town and not worry about it? I do not travel in the winter so it doesnt matter to me.

The place with the Bair-omatic I lived in for almost 20 years was rented. At the time, I was pleased that the owner decided to go with oil, in about '95. I believe that heating oil was well under $ 1.00 a gallon in the late 90's. ( commodities market crude got down to $18 a barrel in '98). Delivered coal was something like $170 a ton. Not much of a cost difference.

The second home with the Keystoker, I owned. I seriously considered going with another coal boiler. Went oil for several reasons. When the Keystoker went, in 2001, heating oil was still pretty cheap, maybe $1.19 a gallon. Coal, I think, was over $200 a ton, delivered. The borough I lived in then, outlawed ash pickup and I had to haul it across town. Being one of the only people that likely would have bought a house with coal heat in my area, going with a coal unit would have really made resale very difficult. I sold the house in 2006. By that time, heating oil was getting up there and coal may have not been a complete deal breaker.

I've used hand fired stoves for supplemental heat for about the last 10 years. For the past 3 or 4 years, I run my DS from Oct. to April. It takes care of about 95% of my whole house heating needs. My oil boiler ( a small 86% efficient unit with an indirect water heater) stills drinks plenty just for DHW. I doubt that reasonably priced heating oil will be around all that long. If it's where it is now, or lower, I may go mostly oil next Winter and just run a ton of coal in mid-Winter, instead of 4 tons. Part of the oil cost for DHW now, would be absorbed into the home heating oil cost.

If or when heating oil goes back to the $3.50 or $4.00 a gallon range, the houses with gas or ground thermal heating will getting all the love if you want to sell.