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one whoop a** coal burner for hot water heat

leonz
leonz Member Posts: 1,096
I know you folks will enjoy this.

www.allcanadianheaters.com

This soft coal stoker from Alberta Province, Canada comes in three sizes for folks that use lots of hot water for hydronic heat, greenhouses and pools and other uses. It has a four inch tapping for hot water just like the Axeman Anderson Anthracite Coal Stokers.

The All Canadian Heater coal stoker design uses a vertical flow of water and flue gasses which allows it to have a secondary burn chamber and heat exchanger above the tuyer/burn pot/coal stoker that burns off the gasses and smoke.










I am unable to upload the Alberta Research Councils research paper that was published after this coal stoker was tested by them but it can be reached and read on the allcanadianheaters home page.

With soft coal as inexpensive as it is it is fun to think about how it could be employed by someone with a high demand for hot water.

Comments

  • STEVEusaPA
    STEVEusaPA Member Posts: 6,506
    leonz said:


    With soft coal as inexpensive as it is it is fun to think about how it could be employed by someone with a high demand for hot water.

    Fun? Like hurting the environment fun?

    steve
    SuperTechCanuckersteamedchicagoSal Santamaura
  • leonz
    leonz Member Posts: 1,096
    Any fossil fuel is going to cause pollution. Natural gas is no different especially when you see what it takes get it out of the ground and how much of it is wasted.

    Many oil drilling platforms have gas diversion systems where the methane coming out of the well with the oil is pulled off the top of the well head and diverted to the gas burning boom on the oil rig and they use a signal flare to light it off as they do not have a gas or oil pipeline to the new well.

    When raw methane/natural gas is collected and piped to a natural gas refinery the methane gas is cleaned and filtered at the refinery removing water vapor and many other naturally occurring chemical vapors like benzene.
    The stink which I believe is Mercaptan is added to the odorless and colorless methane gas before it is pushed into the natural gas pipeline network.

    Many folks around here have gas well on their property and they use it for heating and making hot water. They have to clean the burners more often as the raw methane is very corrosive.

    The methane leaks that have not been sealed around the existing gas wells in the Marcellus Shale gas and oil plays and other oil producing regions like North Dakota add to the pollution that is affecting the planet

    In North Dakota in the Bakken oil plays most all the methane gas is burned off the oil well heads casing with a small pipeline that lets the natural gas collect in the pipe and it travels to a tower where it is burned off

    They do not collect it with gas pipelines as the oil wells went in very quickly, so quickly that they did start installing methane gas collecting pipelines to pull the methane gas out of the wells and pump it to a methane gas refinery rather than just burn it off.

    A lot of land owners in North Dakota have sued the oil companies and oil drillers as the gas they are burning off belongs to the land owner.

    The land owners are losing revenue from the oil wells as the methane is being burned off simply because they cannot collect it as they do not have gas collecting pipelines at the oil wells for the methane gas that is coming out with the light crude oil.

    The oil is pumped out of the ground into a nearby storage tank and the methane gas comes out with the light crude oil. The oil is pumped into a tank truck and the tank truck delivers it to a small tank farm near the BNSF Railway and the oil is pumped to a tank car filling rack where the groups of 8 or more tank cars with 33,000 gallon capacity are filled and then switched out with empty tank cars from the tanks near the loading platforms where they use long OPW fueling booms to fill the tank cars prior to their being switched out with empty tank cars.

    The oil car unit train operated by the Maine Montreal and Atlantic Railroad that destroyed the center of Lac Megantic, Quebec, Canada had Bakken crude oil from North Dakota and it had a huge amount of methane gas in the light crude oil and that created a much greater fire risk that caused all the damage that it did in the towns center.

    The destruction of the center of Lac Megantic, Quebec, Canada was caused by a long chain of events starting at the oil well head in North Dakota.

    I think I still have an article done by the Wall Street Journal that was very well done and very thorough with their research in its examining the disaster before the article was published in the Wall Street Journal

    There is a lot that goes into delivering the gas that has the blue flame that heats a home or business. Natural gas pollutes and it pollutes less than fuel oil or kerosene or coal.

    When the eastern soft coal is burned in older pulverized coal power plant the fly ash is collected in electrostatic precipitators and dumped to be discharged and transported to a cement company in many cases to be used as a component of ready mix concrete.

    The Western Coals from Alaska, Alberta and Wyoming and North Dakota are very friable and burn easily.

    To obtain the same amount of heat energy that is in Eastern Soft Bituminous Coal you have to burn twice as much of the western Sub Bituminous Coal to obtain the same amount of usable heat energy.

    That is why several billion tons of coal have been mined out of
    The Wyodak Coal seam in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming since the early 1970's

    The Wyodak coal seam is covered with a sandstone overburden that is 200 feet thick on average and the Wyodak coal seam is 80 feet thick on average through the entire Powder River Basin.

    The Big George Coal seam is 1,100 feet below the Wyodak Coal seam and is 200 feet thick throughout the entire Powder River Basin.

    I burn anthracite rice coal to heat my home and domestic hot water for 9 or so months of the year and I have an empty oil tank that I will not have to fill again.

    I have a Bradford White 40 gallon hot water heater that uses propane and it does not run very much at all during the winter as the domestic hot water coils hot water output goes into the hot water heater after it mixed with cooler water using a cold water mixing valve.

    I burn 80 pounds per day of rice coal or more on average to heat my leaky house and that averages out to about $13.00+ dollars a day.

    It's a case of pick your poison to reach the finish line I guess.
    Boon
  • newagedawn
    newagedawn Member Posts: 586
    fix your leaky house and lower your footprint, nice system tho
    "The bitter taste of a poor install lasts far longer than the JOY of the lowest price"
  • STEVEusaPA
    STEVEusaPA Member Posts: 6,506
    I'm fully aware of how energy is produced, transported, and how fracking is destroying the planet.
    So your obsession with coal and your coal stoker is greater than your obsession with steel expansion tanks?
    steve
    Canucker
  • Shalom
    Shalom Member Posts: 165
    edited March 2018
    So at 80 lb/day, a ton of coal would last you about 2 weeks.

    I remember my grandmother, who grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn in the 20s, telliing me that her neighbors considered them "well off", at least by the standards of that neighborhood, because they had enough money to buy a ton of coal at a time, and thereby got a better price per pound than the poorer people who could only afford to buy it by the bucketful. (Compare the Commander Vimes' Boots theory of economics.) I figured that was about 2 weeks worth.
  • leonz
    leonz Member Posts: 1,096

    I'm fully aware of how energy is produced, transported, and how fracking is destroying the planet.
    So your obsession with coal and your coal stoker is greater than your obsession with steel expansion tanks?

    =====================================================
    Not an obsession really, I know that burning anthracite coal is much less expensive than oil and living on S.S. in New York State it does not go very far. Many coal burners buy a trailer load of anthracite coal to save money when purchasing it per ton and they have a coal supply that will last many years for them.

    I know the steel compression tank works because the original open to air expansion tank was in use for 35 years in this place and was at the same elevation above the original boiler.


  • jumper
    jumper Member Posts: 2,230
    Atomic energy is least polluting. Good luck trying to sell that. At least for now. Eventually coal,oil,&gas will become expensive enough and then atomic will shine.
  • leonz
    leonz Member Posts: 1,096
    edited March 2018
    The first commercial Thorium Salt powered reactor is 10 years away from being built BUT it will be much much smaller and can be hauled to a build site on a flatbed truck trailer or 60 foot railroad flat car.