The storm has come and gone and we just got power back. That's a pleasant surprise, CL&P was saying that we were unlikely to get power until Sunday.
During the power outage My Mt Vernon AE was running on a 100Ah backup battery. First I have to say the automatic switchover to battery was flawless. The stove was in automatic mode when we lost power on Monday. I changed the heat output setting to -4 ( on a scale of -5, 0, +5) The stove maintained the burn until the next morning at about 7 when the room temperature exceeded the thermostat set point and the stove decided that it was a good time to do a clean cycle. The daytime temperature was mild so l left the stove shutdown
Evening temperature were getting down around 40 degrees so in the evening at about 6 I started the stove manually. Now I have to say that as much as I love my Mt Vernon, the manual start procedure sucks. It makes you wait while it dribbles about a half cup of pellets into the fire pot and then it tells you to light the fire. If you close the door before the fire is really getting hot, the stove does a shutdown and dumps your fire into the ash pan. I won't do that again. I also learned that fire starting gel in a warm fire pot can be somewhat explosive. It didn't go boom, it just went poof. I won't do that again. Once started everything went smoothly. I put the stove on manual mode and set the heat output to medium high. In about a half hour the living room was 70 degrees and the stove maintained the burn at a low level all through the night.
Wednesday was a repeat of tuesday and I was beginning to worry about battery charge.
Thursday more routine until the power returned about an hour ago.
My battery charger indicates that the battery was down to about 25% of capacity after about 45 hours of run time. Now don't try to catch me on the math, all times are approximations. I am an engineer, but I'm not that OCD.
It is quite a difference from last year when we had the freak snow storm. Outside temperatures were a little colder but last year without a pellet stove the inside temperature were about the same as the outside temperatures. This year it was a comfortable 70 degrees inside.
The Mt Vernon AE performed beautifully even with its strange manual start procedure.
During the power outage My Mt Vernon AE was running on a 100Ah backup battery. First I have to say the automatic switchover to battery was flawless. The stove was in automatic mode when we lost power on Monday. I changed the heat output setting to -4 ( on a scale of -5, 0, +5) The stove maintained the burn until the next morning at about 7 when the room temperature exceeded the thermostat set point and the stove decided that it was a good time to do a clean cycle. The daytime temperature was mild so l left the stove shutdown
Evening temperature were getting down around 40 degrees so in the evening at about 6 I started the stove manually. Now I have to say that as much as I love my Mt Vernon, the manual start procedure sucks. It makes you wait while it dribbles about a half cup of pellets into the fire pot and then it tells you to light the fire. If you close the door before the fire is really getting hot, the stove does a shutdown and dumps your fire into the ash pan. I won't do that again. I also learned that fire starting gel in a warm fire pot can be somewhat explosive. It didn't go boom, it just went poof. I won't do that again. Once started everything went smoothly. I put the stove on manual mode and set the heat output to medium high. In about a half hour the living room was 70 degrees and the stove maintained the burn at a low level all through the night.
Wednesday was a repeat of tuesday and I was beginning to worry about battery charge.
Thursday more routine until the power returned about an hour ago.
My battery charger indicates that the battery was down to about 25% of capacity after about 45 hours of run time. Now don't try to catch me on the math, all times are approximations. I am an engineer, but I'm not that OCD.
It is quite a difference from last year when we had the freak snow storm. Outside temperatures were a little colder but last year without a pellet stove the inside temperature were about the same as the outside temperatures. This year it was a comfortable 70 degrees inside.
The Mt Vernon AE performed beautifully even with its strange manual start procedure.
