Quadrafire Santa Fe will not light help

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CdoubleZ

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Mar 29, 2011
41
Central, MA
I have a quadrafire Santa fe (2005?) that was working perfectly for about 2 years for me... well... few minor issues, but all in all its a workhorse.

I had to store it last winter (inside) and didn't use it at all for about 15 months or so.

We just moved into a new place a few weeks back and I just gave the stove a thorough cleaning. I pulled all of the baffles out, the cleanouts etc and vacuumed and scraped everything for its first run of the year.

I immediately noticed an issue that I am currently stuck with. The stove will not light. The red light comes on for the thermostat call for heat, the stove control box will initialize with the 6 blue lights, pellets will drop into the pot, but I hear dead silence... IE no convection blower. When I pull the plug and wait 10-15 minutes and put my hand in the pot it is warm to the touch. I believe the pot is trying to burn the pellets, but the blower is not feeding air.

Based on reading the manual I am assuming the #1 snap disc is not telling the convection blower to fire up, or my convection blower or control box is toast.

Few questions (and I will try these in numerical order):

1) Can I jump out the #1 snap disc to see if it will kick on the blower
2) Does anyone know what to ohm out on the blower and what resistance I should be looking for to test that it is not cooked if this does not work?
3) The control box seems unlikely to have just randomly failed. Does this make sense?
4) Any other ideas?

I will try to jump out the snap disc tonight.
Thanks in advance for your help.
 
AFAIK, The convection blower will not start until the stove has reached temp. The fan that should be on is the combustion blower. It could just be stuck. I recommend pulling it and cleaning it. Then bench test it before you reinstall(oil it if there is oil ports).

I am surprised it even dropped pellets into the burn pot. Without the blower being on. The vacuum switch should keep it from dumping pellets. Check to make sure the hose isn't plugged and the switch is open.
 
sorry i guess i mean the combustion blower. i will take that out and clean it.

funny you mention the vacuum switch... (i guess i should have mentioned this) i JUST bought a new vacuum switch for this stove. before i got to the step im at now (pellets dropping) the stove was doing NOTHING. i jumped the vacuum switch out and then boom the auger started to turn. i thought i just had to replace the vacuum switch and would be back in business.

so i bought a new one last week and installed it. now have a brand new vacuum switch on this thing and a brand new rubber hose. the switch is working. once i hooked this up it at least made it to the next step (dropping pellets).

the reason i think the blower is not working is that its making NO noise... not a sound... all i hear when it flips on is the click from the relay in the control box and the very quiet hum of the auger turning, then the clinks of the pellets.... then nothing happens.
 
Take the motor out and clean it like Jay said. You can hook it up to 110 volts on the bench and see if it works or not. If your not experienced doing such things, working with electricity, then get a stove tech to service and trouble shoot the stove. Yes you can jump the disc and see if that corrects your situation. You mentioned that you totally cleaned this stove so its possible you knocked a wire lose. If you don't find your problem with a disc or the motor I would start looking for lose wires. It does happen. I'm guessing your going to find the disc bad even though it doesn't make sense if it was working when you put the stove away.

Someone that owns and services your brand and model stove should be along to help you out.
 
Hi ZZ, Interesting problem to be sure. If you have pellets feeding, then you have a closed vacuum switch. To close the vacuum switch, the combustion fan has to be running. Yes, you can't hear it but have you actually confirmed this by looking at the motor and seeing if the cooling fan is spinning on its end? Mine are quiet enough that I can't hear them running (when my hearing aid is OFF :lol: ).

If it is running, then you said the pot is warm. During the start up sequence, you should be able to partly pull out the ash pan and see the igniter getting quite red. If it is red, perhaps after sitting all that time, some creatures such as spiders or dirt daubers (a Southern thing, I think) might have closed off the large port that channels air past the igniter and into the burn pot.

If the fan is NOT running, then things are really strange. That would mean that the new vacuum switch is in the closed position (defective), which can be confirmed with an ohm meter reading across the terminals (power off !! and nothing connected to them).

Let's start there and see what you have. No sense taking the motor out yet with the symptoms you have.
 
CdoubleZ said:
ok. thanks. what am i looking for in terms of resistance from the vacuum switch with the power off?
Click to expand...

It should read infinity. The same as when you are holding the two probes away from each other. If it reads zero, like when the probes are touching each other, then the switch is either defective or the wrong kind. Make sure you unplug at least one of the connectors from the switch. AND make sure stove is unplugged!!
 
Stove back up and running. The blower was just stuck. Little turn of the wheel, quick cleaning, power up and it fired right up.

Thanks everyone.
 
Glad u r up & running! I still don't know how you were feeding pellets with the combustion blower not running. The vacuum switch is still suspect. It would be unsafe to run with the switch not in the circuit.
 
ya im def going to check it.

for the hell of it, ill check the old one as well. curious why that one "failed". could be that it never dropped pellets because the blower never initialized.... switch might have been fine after all.
 
Those vacuum switches rarely fail, it is usually best to check everything else in the exhaust system first.
 
I wonder if there is a dead spot on the motor ? Hope the cleaning does the trick for you.
 
so i got my santa fe working fine now. whats weird though is the stove will come on and run for about 15 minutes... then all of a sudden it shuts off. call for heat is still on red. everything operating normally... its just like the program tells it to stop dropping pellets.

so i reset it. it works fine for another 15 minutes. then stops. After about the 3rd or 4th time of me resetting the stove it works perfectly fine... for days now. no more stopping.

any idea why this is happening? this was happening to me before. i would unplug the stove, remove the control box (the brain) and set it aside for 10 minutes (i read that somewhere) and the stove would be back to normal.

does this sound familiar to everyone?

again, the stove is working perfect right now, and i JUST went through a major cleaning in september, as well as worked some other kinks out as described above. it almost seems like a firmware glitch to me.
 
oh forgot to add... the comment i made "for days now. no more stopping" i mean its running on a thermostat... ie its togging between call and no call for heat, turning on and off throughout the day / night as it is designed.
 
Well, from your message above, you say that the stove has been running fine 'for days now. No more stopping'. So that means that your 15 minute shutdowns are a thing of the past and it turns on and off with the thermostat normally.
IMHO, and my guess, your feed auger was not primed or your feed gate was/is not set correctly and it was intermittently bridging over.

Have you set your feed rate on HIGH so that your flame is about 4" above the burn pot on average?___________________________

Have you noticed that your pellets are 2 or more inches in length sometimes?________________________ (this would cause bridging either at the feed gate or at the top of the pellet chute.
 
feed gate. this is a new one...is that the small knob inside the control box? i did mess with the manual feed adjustment inside the pellet bin. i loosened the wingnut and slid plate out another 20-30% or so. i tried this at first. it did make the flame a little higher, which made sense, but the resetting issue persisted dispite this.
 
CdoubleZ said:
feed gate. this is a new one...is that the small knob inside the control box? i did mess with the manual feed adjustment inside the pellet bin. i loosened the wingnut and slid plate out another 20-30% or so. i tried this at first. it did make the flame a little higher, which made sense, but the resetting issue persisted dispite this.
Click to expand...

Yes, the feed gate, as I call it, and the slide plate, as you call it :) are the same thing. Per the manual, to properly set up your feed on your stove, you are supposed to set the 'feed adjustment' when the stove is set to HIGH. Adjust the feed in small increments waiting 15 minutes or more between each adjustment until you see an AVERAGE height of the flame to be 4". Then your feed will be correct for all heat settings.

AND this adjustment is not a PERMANENT setting, by any means. As you burn different lots of the same brand or change brands you MUST recheck your feed setting. Even within the same batch of pellets, you might find variations in pellet lengths. This is the main cause of erratic feed.

Opening the feed, as you did, was moving in the right direction and it probably took a while until the auger properly filled with pellets. You still need to set it properly.

Good luck. These things need TLC and tinkering. They are NOT 'set and forget' appliances, to be sure.
 
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