pell it you should be able to put a pile of decent pellets through that stove before you get an appreciable build up.
The trick is to make sure that your air flow comes through the bottom and none of the air bypasses the burn pot by coming up the outside of it.
This is what the gasket added to the Saranac version takes care of, it both blocks the gap around the burn pot and partially blocks the upper row of holes in the burn pot thereby forcing most of the air to come up through the pellet pile and ejecting the ash from the burn pot thus preventing it from building up in the burn pot receptacle at a fast rate. I've managed to run 26 bags through my stove on heat setting 1 - the 1 and 4 lights on, this is a very grungy setting. I could have gone longer but I got sick of looking at the messy window.
You also need to make certain that your controller is set for the correct stove btu production. A good number of them had the jumper actually set for the larger version of the stove line, whoops,
Since one asked there was also a few that escaped with the wrong high limit switch installed.
This creates nuisance shutdowns where as the wrong controller setup causes high limit trips and damage to blowers and possible damage to the controller.
The blowers are also just about the minimum required to operate the stove provided nothing blocks the convection airflow and the convection blower can not handle the controller being set incorrectly without it going out all of the time on high limit trips above heat range 2 with very good pellets or above 3 with average pellets. The air flow isn't enough to keep the heat exchanger under the 250
high limit.
The fact that your pot is warping makes me think that you need a gasket. My first burn pot warped so bad that it broke some of the welds that held the rim to the pot.
There was at least one member on here that remarked that with his new controller the stove didn't seem to produce as much heat, that would be true if the new controller was jumpered for other than the high btu version of the stove line.
The complaint I have is that the stove is too cramped and that as a result there is more heat related stress on the parts inside the shell than is needed. They actually produced a snorkel to get the convection blower further form the firebox while that helped somewhat it didn't work very well if the controller was set incorrectly. I have the snorkel on my stove.
One of the results of the cramped space is that if the grill work that admits air into the shell gets crudded up with a bit of various amounts of pet fur, etc... the blowers will protect themselves by thermaling off resulting in the stove shutting down.
My second igniter is still going strong but the stove is only cycled once a week. I suspect that it is due for failure shortly as it has been over 3 years, maybe it will last longer because the replacement I installed is shorter than the original.
The POF (low limit, convection fan control) on the stove needs to be kept fairly clean if you use the lowest firing rate as it becomes insulated and doesn't see the temperatures needed to keep the stove firing. I'd also expect this to be a problem at the two lowest firing rates if the stove was subject to several tons without it being wiped off. The stove also becomes sensitive to fines at that rate as the pellet weight being fed drops. With certain pellets you need to install a butterfly damper unit to use the low firing rates.
I've played devils advocate to see what happens with my unit over the last 5 heating seasons and would have done a few things differently than was done, however I see a lot of other stoves with all of the same parts, and issues etc..
As I told Mr. Tibbs in a PC I have a lot of patience and tend run down problems and fix them, I guess it is because I did a lot of trouble shooting in a prior occupation. Now I just clean a pellet stove, make brews, and tell others to clean their stoves.