Trying to get the courage up...

to change out my auger motor and bearing, before it gives up the ghost during the coldest day of the year. The bearing yelps occasionally, especially when I turn up the heat. Reading through some of the posts here, people sometimes get a bit of a workout getting the old motor off of these Enviros. Any tips? Do's and don't's?

Success! Not too bad of a job. Took about 5 minutes to actually get the motor off, no tool needed other than the wrench to loosen the square(?) bolt. No pictures it looks like all the other new bearings and augers you've seen installed.

I'm glad I took things apart. The top of the auger had a thin coat of rust and didn't like spinning in the top bearing. Took a bottle brush with some solvent to the bearing. Steel wool to scratch off the rust then a coat of 3-in-one on the auger top, stuck it up there and spun it around a few time, pulled it down and wiped a bunch of gray gunk off. Did that a couple of times.

Stove was built April 1996. Last thing I want is to have it fail Christmas Eve, with no chance of getting parts for days and better things to do with my time off than fix a stove.

..and I'm an idiot. I replaced the motor and bearing to be pro-active, suspecting that I wouldn't get another year out of the stove. I also noticed that this year, the flame wasn't as high at any given "Dial-a-Fire" setting as it was last year. I was a little concerned about whether the stove would keep up with real cold weather this year. Now it's back to normal, with the flames just touching the top baffle plate with the dial at 12 o'clock. I wish I could say I put 1 and 1 together, and assumed that pellets just weren't feeding as fast as they used to. Maybe I did, subconsciously.