25-pdvc Auger motor banged hole in itself

I've had my 25 pdvc for almost a decade and never needed to replace any parts. Last night we come home and its 58 degrees in the house! Find out bottom auger motor not working. I took it out to bench test it and when i got it out I noticed a hole in the bottom of the gearbox! It was the shape of the little shelf under it.
After reinstalling the spare i keep, I figured out what went wrong. Periodically the motor lifts itself up off the little shelf it rests on. It then taps lightly down. You can hear it tap or rather light clunk when operating. It was doing that for 2 years but i always thought it was just the bottom auger clunking pushing pellets.
Well, 2 years of light tapping was enough to slowly smash a hole in the gearbox.

I seem to recall a sleeve on the gearbox ( which disintegrated many years ago) well i guess thats what it was for. Temporarily i installed a piece of rope gasket on the shelf so now the auger motor rests on that vs tapping on metal. luckily I checked the upper auger motor because the same thing is happening there too! its far from being a hole like the bottom one, so i put a piece of rope gasket there too to try to prevent this again.

The stove is almost much quieter now.

It did drive me slightly nuts, but I work a lot so im not really home enough to say "hey i should take care of that clunking". I did one time a few months ago pull the auger and wire brush it thinking that was the cause but it didnt help anything and i didnt notice the bottom of the gearbox.

The hilarious part is i cleaned up that spot with a dremel and the auger motor still works! it was just the bent metal holding the gear back. It just has a hole in the case. Anyone have an old non working one they would want to part with?

Beaudeen said:

JB Weld works well to patch the hole..pick it up at HD or Lowes.

Click to expand...

hmm, that might just work if i take it apart, set it down on some wax paper jb weld up the hole, repack it with grease and put it back together.
How does jb weld hold up to heat?

I lined the shelf it rests on with some rope gasket and hi temp gasket adhesive, seems to be working quite well.

I did open up the gearbox to dremel the hole and clean it up. there was metal keeping the gear from spinning but otherwise no other damage besides the hole in the case. i connected to a test lead and it ran fine, even under simulated load.

The grease is definitely shot. it resembles little wax balls now, which is probably why it did not leak out when hot. i did remove the grease. I am going to try to jb weld the hole shut, then regrease it and keep it as a 3rd spare. I always keep a spare auger motor on hand brand new.

This did get me thinking however, about how the stove is aging and how much i depend on it. I ordered a bunch of extra spare parts like a combustion blower and a convection fan. I figure these parts probably dont have much life left in them. I do run my stove 24/7 and hard (but keep extremely clean).

My long term plan is to get a new stove, one that is maybe a bit larger so it works less hard to heat the house, and put that in its place. take the 25 pdvc and put it at the other end of the house, in the dining room, where it would still function but more of a nicety and a backup vs the workhorse.

I would definitely still stick with englander just not sure which one. I like the availability of parts to the DIY'er the great service and so far no complaints about reliability. Not many things go 10 yrs anymore without breaking down.

I had wanted to try a pellet stove for a few years. Wife wasnt thrilled at the idea. I finally won, but as I didnt know too much about them and how good it would work and how much money would be saved I went with the 25-pdvc. It wasnt a very large investment at all to get up and running, but the first week after I installed it i knew i had made a great decision. It is a very simple unit and does what it says it will do 99% of the time.
I cant even figure out how much money it has saved me over its life span, it is in the thousands if not higher, while keeping the house a lot warmer than what i'd ever dreamed of setting the furnace on. I avoided the whole oil boom entirely. This stove owes me nothing so I cant complain.
I did get lucky with a few things like placement. It's in the livingroom and our bedroom is farthest away so it's always cooler in there but we like the bedroom a bit cooler than the rest of the house. Otherwise its fairly even.
BTW the wife now loves it and theres no objection to getting another one. I later asked her why she was so against it. She thought it was more like a firewood thing and pictured stacks of wood, dirt, spiders and centipedes. She was really at ease when she saw the nice clean bags of pellets.

Yes I could have and still can. Those things are fancy with a lot of bells and whistles. I'd worry that it would be about as reliable as that Audi I had. I drove Audi's courtesy car more than I drove my own, as the blasted thing was broken more often than not.
I just like to put the key in and go! I'm still getting the hang of this life thing but i am learning sometimes simple is the way to go.