Etienne Gregoire Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 We just bought a house on "rue Principale" in the village of Dunham Qu Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daryl Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 Quality coal will help the smoke situation some. As for smell, it is quite 'country' (a selling feature). There is a method of making a cyclone for cleaning the majority of dust from the smoke - a cyclone about 36" high with a decent fan would be the smallest you could use. I tried a similar setup many years ago and did not get the result I wanted. There are cyclones illustrated and for sale on ANGELE Schmiedetechnik - ANGELE-SHOP Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glenn Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 The key to the smoke problem is fire maintenance. If you keep the coal open at the top with fire coming through like a volcano, it burns a lot of the smoke. If you go easy on the air, it produces less smoke. Once coked there is little smoke being produced from the forge. The chimney draws in fresh air removes what smoke is not burned by good fire maintenance. You may have to play with the chimney size and height to get the best combination for your set up. You are always going to have some smoke get into the air so try to make friends with your neighbors. Try to forge when they are at work and don't forge when they have a cook-out or garden party. Charcoal burns cleaner than coal. If you have a chance, look into forging with industrial coke (from coal). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flying Sparks Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 Here in sunny England we have smokeless coal that is required by law in some areas, not much use to you in the wilds of Canada though. Goog luck in finding a solution. Sparky Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
irnsrgn Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 coal fired power plants have to use scrubbers to get rid of smoke and ash. Not sure how they are made now, but they used to have the smoke going thru a container with thousands of green glass marbles. A water mist was sprayed on the top of the marbles and smoke particles and ash collected on the wet marbles and was eventually washed to the bottom where it was collected and then disposed of. Never really seen a scrubber, but have seen the marbles for sale at surplus places here. Of course the power plants use a very low grade of more or less surface coal, that has at best 8 or 9000 BTU per pound and they ground it up, and blew it into the boiler mixed with propane to get any heat out of it. A possible solution might be to put a 55 gal steel drum at the top of the stack with a foot or so of the flue sticking up thru the bottom. The smoke and ash would exit the flue and expand in the larger drum space and the decrease in upward speed would in theory let the ash cool and drop into the bottom of the drum, where it would need to be cleaned out regularly to prevent the bottom from rusting out. A fine filter screen could be put around the top with a cap on top to further help contain the contaminents, but the smell would still be noticable. There is also the problem of greater wind side load against the greater area of the outside of the drum. Not sure if this idea will work or not, it just popped into my head. I have an inquiring mind and this problem intrigues me, I am not an engineer or real smart, but if you try it, I would be very interested in the outcome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jayco Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 Etienne....one of the old blacksmithing books (I don't remember which one unfortunately)describes a sort of 'retort system' to burn away excess smoke at the forge by recirculating exhaust gases and smoke back into the forge. If I remember correctly, an intake pipe is connected to a tee in the chimney and connected to the intake side of your blower. Even though I usually don't use a chimney in my little shed/shop,I did try this to see how it worked. All I had was a metal trash can lid (for a forge hood) and a piece of flex pipe to reroute the smoke back into my blower. This system does get rid of a lot of smoke. The only problem I encountered was that the hot gases got my old handcrank blower kinda hot. I was afraid I might melt the bearings out of it. But in all fairness to the idea,mine was just a quick experiment with scrap materials. I only had a short piece of flex-pipe and the gases had little chance to cool before reentering the blower. If done correctly,with the right materials, a retort could be quite effective. Worth investigating,anyway. James Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jacob Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 What about using a large diameter chimney with an extra fan pushing fresh air through it? It could help your chimney draw better and would decrease the density of the smoke. There wouldn't be any fewer particles, just more air in between to keep the neighbors happy when you build up the fire with fresh coal. It would have to be a large enough fan to make up for all of the cool air in the chimney. I'm currently building my chimney 12" diameter and about 20' from the shop floor to the peak. I'm not sure if I'll have to make any neighborly adjustments. We'll see when I fire it up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wim Posted August 22, 2007 Share Posted August 22, 2007 Etienne, What James describes, to reroute the smoke into your air blower is described in "The complete Blacksmith, by Alexander Weygers, a very practical dutch engineer, that used blacksmithing to make tools for his sculpting work. I have no problem, being in Afrika, we have nice wheather always, and I forge outside in the garden. But I agree with Glenn, once the fire is going and managed well, there is no smoke problem anymore. Wim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glenn Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 I use a 24 inch diameter chimney (BP0333 55 Forge with a Supercharger) that is 6 feet tall and it works very well. When there is a hole in the top of the coal for the fire to come through like a volcano, the fire burns the smoke and the heat from the burning fire and burning smoke is more then enough to create a nice draft. This draws in more fresh air which burns more smoke which produces more heat and draft. This pulls in more air that dilutes what smoke is left. It works well for me. I have also used a side draft hood with a 14 inch diameter stack that was 5 feet above the 3 foot tall hood. This 8 feet was not enough height. Another 5 feet of height made a wonderful difference. You many times have to adjust the stack diameter and stack height for the best results on YOUR forge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ertwdan Posted August 23, 2007 Share Posted August 23, 2007 Etienne, Try using charcoal to get the fire started and up to forging temperature, then mix in the coal from the outside of the fire, pushing into the centre. As the coal "cokes" the volitiles will be burned off by the heat of the charcoal fire. Eventually you end up with a coke fire, with little to no smoke. A good stack is essential and there are a lot of resources online that will help you out on the road to designing/building your forge stack. Also, check out Thak the Blacksmith &Armourer- Ontario, Canada Thak (Robb Martin) sells smithing coal in Canada and due to his location, he has worked out a deal with Home Hardware to ship 70 lb bags to any of their locations. E-mail Rob and he will let you know how to approach you local Home Hardware dealer (I believe you have one in Granby) so that he doesn't think you're a nut. Your insurance company are proabably the only one's that can cause you real trouble. Things get ugly if they deny you home insurance because you have a blacksmith shop in your backyard. Little trinkets (like hand-forged bottle openers) are great "bribes" for the neighbours. I've also tried to let the neighoburs know that they can have things built and repaired at my shop for a very small fee if they like. If you neighbours are customers, they usually a little more reluctant to cause a stir. Well....Bonne chance Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bentiron1946 Posted August 27, 2007 Share Posted August 27, 2007 I have had to switch to gas because of "clean air" requirements in the winter. Here in Arizona we get inversions where it is warm at the surface of the ground and very cold a higher elevations so pollution is trapped at the surface. My neighbors have turned me in numerous times for polluting. Without a scrubber or afterburnner I don't think you can build that clean of a fire. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glenn Posted August 27, 2007 Share Posted August 27, 2007 Could you use a water mist to wash the particulates from the smoke? I know the power companies here use an electrostatic participator to remove the fly ash. They have electrostatic participators small enough to use on house (home) heating system. Maybe a combination of things would work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ertwdan Posted August 29, 2007 Share Posted August 29, 2007 I looked at at using a wet scrubber. The big drawback to any type of scrubber or precipitator is that you need to use a hot-gas induced draft fan. This is a fan that is in the hot side of the flue and sucks the flue gas through the scrubber. The flue gas won't travel through the scrubber without some force. Doing this cheaply is not easy. The real issue is keeping bearings in the ID fan. Most cheaper fans (like the furnace variety) are made to run in clean air. The grit and temperature is hard on fans as the remaining fly ash will stick to the fan blades and possibly upset the balance. An unbalanced fan will wipe out the bearings fairly quickly. I've seen this on a large power boiler....not pretty. So, gas forge it is......but only if the neighbours won't let you keep burning coal. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tbrforge Posted August 29, 2007 Share Posted August 29, 2007 Being way down south in Georgia I am certainly not familiar with Canada insurance regs. I am familiar with the different grades of coal. I picked up coal from the local university coal yard for years, this was some smoking coal, I would choose a good time (usually late at night) and coke off a whole bunch of coal and store it for later use. Then I tried metallurgical coke, clean, hard to start, needs constant air, priced well if bought in large quantity. Now I am using a flee market purchase. Couldn't pass up the price. Clinkers rather heavily but I've worked the same fire all day regularly. Bigger stack diameter means more air movement means greater dispersement of smoke. I very rarely change my neighbors for (stuff) things that I do for them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ertwdan Posted October 23, 2007 Share Posted October 23, 2007 I started up the new forge this weekend using charcoal to start and coal once everything was up to temperature. There was no appreciable levels of smoke and due to the fact I have a large chimmney (10" x 14") the was a certain amount of dilution. This seems to be a good way to keep from drawing the wrong type of attention to your hobby. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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