For those who wonder

The challenge won't be combustion technology. There are plenty of great stoves. The new challenge is going to be performance in the first hour...you can listen here a a recent article I was asked to write.

Megaphone

BKVP

 

If coal was available here I’d be interested in a coal stove. From what is written in this thread the low and slow burn is something they’re great at too.

Of course, low and slow doesn’t mean a cold house. You still choose your temperature and hold it with a burn rate that matches the heat loss.

 

Any of these systems are what I should put in my house, and just use the insert on really cold days and when we want a nice fire to look at. Kuuma might be the only option now.

 

That would be the best choice...Drolet has the Heat Commander too, but IMO that's a good enough for now solution, the Kuuma is a one n done solution.

 

Yup, thats true.

But.......square footage gives you the footprint of the area which is a good enough starting point to find out, no?

 

Yes I can see that first hour testing being a challenge especially for cat stoves that need to run in bypass mode for awhile.

 

I don’t typically like to mix talking coal on a wood/stove forum because I’m not here to upset anyone. I’m just a stove guy…and I like them all.

Below I will address some things I’ve learned about burning anthracite that pertain to Highbeam’s comments. I could fill this page, so I will purposefully leave out a lot of information and just highlight some things.

To address the last part of what you said…you’re 110% correct.

To address the first part…
Yes they’re great at low and slow. Good anthracite stoves can idle down to 150F on the stove with the right chimney.

The chimney is as “important” for coal as it is for wood. Notice my “word” choice there. A good working/drafting chimney for wood will most certainly work with coal, but vice versa may not be true. Why?

Coal (anthracite specifically) needs far less draft than wood. For comparison I can burn nut coal on my chimney at -.005”WC where with wood, and in order to get a clean burn with my pre-EPA stove, I’d have to achieve -.05”WC or higher. By the manometer numbers that doesn’t seem like much, but it IS a lot of difference. It would be like taking that sale wood stove burning nice, hot, and clean and then completely closing down the air…it would instantly blacken the glass doing such. That said, keep in mind I’m burning the stove far less than what the manufacturer recommends…and I can do it without even thinking about it even though it is dangerous…this chimney is masonry inside the home and it pulls on the manometer even when there’s no fire in the stove.

If you took the manometer tube from your stove pipe (I’ve actually tried this at the direction of another coal burner to show me how little air a coal stove actually moves through the chimney) and placed the tube near your mouth and blow past the tube ever so gently and try to hold the red fluid in the manometer on a number (pick any number)…you simply cannot hold a number and no matter how little you blow you still blow harder than the chimney actually pulls on the stove. Even putting the tube in your mouth makes no difference, it’s even harder to maintain any number on the manometer for more than a split second. That’s when the light came on for me showing me the difference between a wood stove and a coal stove. As the coal burners so often say, forget everything you know about burning wood because anthracite is different…it burns from the bottom up, not top down outside-in like wood. Unburned coal on top is what slows the burn and helps move heat to the sides of the fire and stove.

Your BK is the closest thing in a wood stove as you can get to an anthracite coal stove. I could do more comparisons but then this post gets long because there so many variables and at least 4 different ways I can run my stove that I don’t have the time and space to detail here.

Anthracite isn’t just good at low and slow. A better way to say that would that coal can maintain any temperature you desire to allow/need the stove to run. The hotter you allow it to run the easier it is to run and tend the stove. The lower you run the stove temperature, then that’s where the factor of human skill comes into effect because a person has to be willing to put in the time to learn how to run the stove low and slow…especially once you reach the threshold of teetering the fire on the brink of going out…it’s hard to learn how to ride that fine line without killing it…sort of like the threshold of keeping a catalyst burning.

On a normal cruise it’s a pain to empty ash every day…twice a day…which means having to go outside into the cold blowing snow twice a day.

To me that’s the big benefit of Blaze King stoves…their deep fireboxes. Jokingly…the government should mandate all wood stoves should have a deep firebox to contain ash for weeks on end before having/needing to empty ash. Did I mention how nice it would be to tend a BK stove once over a 30-45+hr burn and never touch the stove again during that time? The only downside to me about coal is the ash. There are pros and cons to everything and I could detail those differences here, and I could make a great case for coal…

…I’d rather make a case for having 2-4 stoves on the same hearth……hooked together with “Y’s” with diverters in the stove pipes so that we could switch stoves back and forth, on the same chimney, like switching antennas on an amateur radio station tower. Would be one nice QTH for stoves and radios…73’s.

 

In 2015 EPA funded the R & D of a hybrid coal/wood stove. Two companies were involved. Woodstock Soapstone and US Stove Company. This was undertaken to help the residents of the Navajo reservation in the four corners region. If you review the EPA list of approved list you see it listed under Woodstock Soapstone.

EPA now has, by default, emissions data on burning coal. This is setting the table for future compliance requirements.

And yes, it was a catalytic woodstove. When coal is burned, the Sulphur overplates the precious metals, reducing the efficacy of the combustor. But burning wood, yup..it removes the Sulphur. Cool design waiting to happen here folks!

Incidentally, the coal was bituminous coal, available free on the Navajo reservation. It was not anthracite!

BKVP

 

Actually, by increasing the CPSI (cells per square inch) and increasing total surface area, a bypass may not need to be opened or even needed in the stove design.

 

You may be only partially correct if my memory serves me well…I believe it was a form of sub-bituminous coal called lignite, which is dirtier, lower in btu and also contains more sulfur…which to your point…makes the catalyst stove’s ability to remove sulfur by burning wood all the more impressive.

Anthracite is low sulfur and clean burning…what libs used to refer to as “clean coal”…but they abandoned miners for a pipe dream called green energy. We all want clean air and water and cheap energy. If we use everything at our disposal there’s no limit to this countries future…but we must stop lying to each other over money and work together.

Sure, a renewable resource like wood will always be best and we should continue to push the boundaries of clean burn technologies (for all fuels), but not at the expense of mandates, red tape, and over regulation that costs so much that it strangles and stymies innovation and new upstart small business. This country over regulated the car industry and now there’s only a handful (less) of American owned automakers (used to be lots of automakers)…not to mention the nearly 400+ stove companies (that’s just wood stoves from the 70’s in this century not counting the century prior) driven out of business by regulations. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing that then becomes a problem.

Rant over…

Drill baby drill, mine baby mine, cut them trees and replant them…that’s my $.02…and lots of people go back to work providing for their families.

 

I knew what it was....same in Alaska. I just didn't want to say they were burning dirt!

BKVP

 

Ah yes, I think the Jotul F500 V3 is designed this way and maybe a few others?

 

I have the wood-only-burning version of the Woodstock Stove made for the Navajo.
From what I remember reading about the stove at the time, there has been a decrease in respiratory illness in the folks that have the stove installed in their home compared to whatever burning appliance they previously had installed. In some instances I remembered reading it was essentially an open fire in the room. (both coal and wood from my recollection)

I personally love the stove. It was in my budget window, heats my whole home and I think looks nice. I don't have much to add about how the stove heats other than to say it seems that it strangles out more from the wood than my old stove did and across a longer time. An actual win-win.
Although the window itself is a little on the small side.