Iron Fireman

The fellow that bought the original building that became the iron fireman factory and warehouse in Portland, Oregon was looking for a complete iron fireman coal stoker that he could display in the foyer of his company office for its historical value.

I am not sure if he ever found one as we have not communicated since he and I chatted about the iron fireman coals stokers previously.

The iron fireman coal stokers were beautiful machines with their inherent simplicity in design with its dual tube design with fire brick lined fire box where one complete tube was used for combustion air and the second tube was the coal feed tube that augured the western and easter coal to the base of the Tuyere/burn pot to allow for more complete combustion of the western Sub Bituminous Stoker Coal they were designed for.

The Tuyere/burn pot was both shallow and wide which allowed for a massive amount of combustion air to enter the burn pot to burn the western coal to a very fine ash as it was very friable/breakable and has a low sulphur content which allowed it to burn cleanly with very little coal ash but it required more sub bituminous coal to equal the amount of heat energy that eastern high sulphur bituminous coal has.

The Lehigh Valley Railroad (LVRR) only used Anthracite coal for its steam locomotives and shops as it was plentiful and produced no smoke.

The Western Sub Bituminous coal burns cleanly with little if any noticeable smoke in a stationary forced draft or induced draft combustion coal stoker.

If the Big George coal seam in Wyoming was opened up it would provide so much coal that the eastern coal mines and natural gas producers would never be able to compete with the amount of energy it could provide due to its 200+ foot coal vein thickness. The issue with it is its depth at the horizon of the Big George Coal Seam as this coal seam begins at 1,100 feet below the surface of the Powder River basin in the State of Wyoming.

people were still buying stokers in 1973?

Coal stokers are still being manufactured for Steam Heating, Hydronic heating and scorched air heating by EFM, Keystoker, AHS, Axeman Anderson and DS. The imported EKO stoker boiler can be used to burn anthracite coal, wood chips, wood pellets and firewood.

Most of the coal stoker boilers and furnaces made today can be equipped with domestic hot water coils as well and you save a great deal of money by using stoker coal as fuel.

The domestic hot water coil allows you to burn coal the year round to make domestic hot water.

Anthracite Coal burns with no smoke, Sub Bituminous Coal produces very little smoke.

Lignite Coal when burned in a stoker produces smoke,

Sub Bituminous Coal costs much, much less to buy than Anthracite coal.

If you are lucky enough to live west of the Mississippi basin you can buy Sub Bituminous stoker coal from the mines in Wyoming and Montana. You can also buy Lignite stoker coal for fuel in the Dakotas.

Coal stokers furnaces and boilers have several types of coal burning grates or burn pots/tuyeres.

The much larger All Canadian Coal Fired Stokers are hot water boiler stokers that use a burn pot/tuyere like the iron fireman stoker design where the coal feed auger is separate from the under fed combustion air where it uses an air tube duct delivering combustion air to the base of the tuyere/burn pot.

The major differences with the 5 sizes of the All Canadian Coal fired Stokers are the burn pot design, its use a vertical fire tube system with spiral diffusers/afterburners in the fire tubes used to create greater burn and much less smoke and a variable frequency drive system for the coal feed.

The burn pot tuyere used in this coal stoker boiler is a short in height and the tuyere is covered with a heavy casting that funnels the coal to the center of the tuyere/burn pot and the burning coal is pushed through the hole in the heavy casting and the combustion air that is being blown into the base of the Tuyere/burn pot creates a huge fire that burns the coal as it is being pushed through the opening and burned to a very fine ash.

The heavy casting cover resting on the burn pots edge has cast fingers on its round edge that mesh with the gear driven rotating finger that pushes the casting around to carry the coal ash away from the center of the burn pot/tuyere where it falls off the edge and is collected with a small skid steer loader or sub compact tractor to be disposed of.

The water temperature controls for this boiler use a single high limit aquastat and a second single aquastat for the low limit temperature.

These vertical fire tube boilers are designed to be used in a separate small building where the coal is fed from a coal bin or covered silo.

A steel compression tank is mounted above the boiler is required to create the pressure balance in the system to push and pull the water up through the boiler with a circulator or a gravity hot water system used to heat a green house or for other uses.

The smallest stoker boiler they manufacture is the NAC20 model that is rated for 500,000 BTU and has 2 inch tapping's.

If they built a 100,000 BTU model I would have bought one for my home heating use.