Originally Posted by
MoAlpha
Do you remember exactly how it worked? I guess the conveyor had to be a belt, which fed a screw, which lifted the coal to the rotating platen. Then the ash fell off the edge and somehow made it into two galvanized ash cans via a Y-connector. That's all I remember, but boy did that thing fascinate me.
We had to fire up the coal furnace a couple times when I was a kid - when they put in the NG furnace, they left the coal furnace still plumbed into the system. It was strictly shovel-fed, from a pile of coal that was there when we moved in. Shovel in some coal, jiggle the grates, occasionally shovel out the ash. I don't think we ever went more than a few days. There's probably still coal in the furnace room there.