Whitfield II combustion fan won't turn on?!

The combustion fan is not on any of the snap switches in the stove, it goes directly to the control board.

Take the old removed combustion fan and wire it up to a patch cord, (WARNING This is playing with 120 volt AC which if you do not know what you are doing or are not careful can kill you WARNING) plug that into a house outlet. The fan should turn at full speed. If it does your old fan is fine and the problem lies elsewhere.

Do you own a digital multi meter? You can do a an Ohms test or continuity test through the motor (old and new) to see of there is current. Also the old motor is a servicable motor that requires oil each year...that can be sometihing to look into. However, if the new motor does not power up on start....the only control for this is the control board. there is a chance that the wires to the motor are lacking electrcity via a bad terminal connection or frayed wire. Teh good news is that if you did not need the motor you may be able to return it in lieu or another purchase or a control board, less shipping charges. Where did you get your motor? I'm guessing control board.

I'm not going to comment on the straight wood vs pellet stove argument.

I will however comment on the self sufficiency side of things, that would be a lot easier via the wood stove route, no need to generate electricity by any means at all and most of those involve electronics these days.

If you have the land with standing trees you can do quite a bit to be self sufficient it is however a lot of work and takes careful planning.

That controller can be fixed and there is a woman on here Snowy Rivers who has designed and built her own off the shelf parts based controller that is currently running two different Whitfield stoves. Most problems revolve around electrolytic capacitors or triacs all of which are standard electronic parts and with soldering skills can be replaced.

Get in touch with snowy here on the forum and check out her conversion for the Whitfield board. Its not really all that complicated and you'll learn alot. Spending hundreds on anew board is not fun...but buying a used board may not be a better experience. I have a Whitfield advantage I with a bad board and I swapped in a P20 board and just calibrated the feed settings up to meet the air flow demand. Got the p20 board for free from a junked stove on Cl.

Hey hey hey, the old combustion fan won't run trick :roll:

Lets get a tad bit of info here. Does your stove have a heat control knob, a start button and a room air fan knob ???

These Old whits had issues at times with the Triacs (controls fan speeds) going south.

The Triac is a little chip like device that controls fan speeds by the amount of time that the power is on on both sides of the wave/

When the triac goes south the fan can either run full speed or not at all or some form of the two and can even burn up the motors.

If you need to get up and flying, there is a quick way to get you going.

WARNING \

As was mentioned, you are dealing with 120V ac here and it can be dangerous if you are not familiar with handling such stuff.


OK now that we have mentioned the cautions.


If the room air fan and the auger are working ok then proceed as follows.

Tap into the main power feed and install a Casa Blanca fan speed controller (just a Triac with a Knob is all)

Wire this controller directly to your exhaust fan and just bypass the feed from the board.

Tape up the original wires that fed the draft fan so they wont cause issues and keep them intact.

Now you can adjust the draft fan speed with the knob and get up and going.

Normally these fans will run at 3000 RPM on full line voltage.
During most operation the fan runs close to full speed.

You can start with the fan at full RPM and then if this is too fast for the lower fuel feed settings, just slow it down a tad until the fire is happy.

If you run too much draft at low fire settings you could burn the fire out or "Blow it out"

This is not rocket science and will take just a little fiddling to find the sweet spot.

You can simply drill the needed holes in the side of the stove panel near the original controls.

I would say, Mark the control knob and make some sort of alignment mark with tape of ??? to allow you to be able to easily repeat the settings you find that work.

The control board has 3 major controls, the timer for the feed motor, the room air fan speed triac and the draft fan speed triac.

Just because the draft fan speed triac is gone does not mean that the other controls will fail soon or at all.

The draft fan speed and the room air fan speed are tied in with the fuel feed settings.
As the fuel feed is set higher the daft fan runs slightly faster.

The large whits generally run the draft fan at around 2600 RPM on the upper fuel ranges and down around 2500 on the low setting.

The room air fans control knob is also effected by the fuel setting. On low the fan speed can be set lower than it can on high.


If you look over the forum you can scare up the schematic that I posted some time ago for wiring up a custom control unit using off the shelf parts.

Its cheap and far better than the boards that come with these stoves.

This need not be a tedious or frantic situation and also need not cost a fortune.

If the stove is in good condition mechanically then its likely a good candidate for a refit.


Be safe and keep us posted.

OH, here is a Piccy of the needed fan speed contoller

This one is marked FAN ONLY
There are light dimmers and fan speed controllers. Be sure to use a fan speed controller

Just another tid bit here, turning the knob all the way counter clockwise it will "CLICK" into the OFF position. If you wire this controller in directly to the L1 line be sure to install an inline fuse ( 5 amps max)

You will need to turn the fan on and off with this control as the board will not do it.


Any questions, just ASK

Snowy

I hunted down your posting Snowy
https://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/viewthread/80023/

Thanks for running that down.


Just reread the original post.

With the red light on all the time and the motors feeding constantly, there is an issue with the board.]


Looks like its time to do the new timer thing, and add a couple triacs to run the fans.

Snowy

The exhaust fan should be adjustable to allow some control over the fan speed if need be

Rock on. Good luck

Snowy

I would buy a used whitfield Advantage and use it for parts. See if you can get credit for the fan you don't need. Make sure you use a surge protector.

Thanks to Snowy Rivers for sharing her results and ideas with us here at this magnificent forum. It's always interesting and useful to read her posts.
I'm certainly inspired to start making my own control board based on her results and then keep the original just as a back up.

It will take some time and thorough preparation, though. If I get started, I sure will post my results here at Hearth.com. I'm also looking forward to read about how Widgeonmangh proceeds with his control system.

Widgeonmangh, I can imagine that you need some heat from your Whit here and now. This may be possible, provided that your circuit board issue is the same that forum member Coffeeman5 had with a Whitfield Advantage II T some weeks ago. Exactly the same stove.... and, I believe the symptoms were very similar to those of your stove.
It turned out that the remedy was very simple. Please read about it here:

https://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/viewthread/81284/#975466

Well that's a different issue for sure.
Still, based upon your description of the symptoms, your board doesn't appear to be totally malfunctioning. Maybe it's just a bad connection somewhere. For instance, the molex connector could be oxydized or the wiring could be damaged.
BTW, you say that there's no vacuum-/pressure switch installed. Now that's strange. As far as I know all Advantage stoves, even the very first ones, had this safety device installed.
You know, the previous owner might have removed the pressure switch and jumped its wires??

My knowledge is mainly based on this .pdf which should cover Advantage stoves from serial no. 1001 and up to 75864.

http://www.hearthtools.com/parts/whitfield_wire_diagrams.pdf

In order to leave out a wiring/bad connector issue you could ask your friend, who is an electrician, to bring a voltmeter... you see, the output voltages from the control board to the auger motor, room blower and combustion blower are all very service friendly accessible underneath the nylon plugs on the front of the control board. See pic below.
With a knife they can easily be prised out, but... remember to put them back again after measuring, as they cover dangerous voltages.

If healthy voltages are present there, then your control board is also ok.

Good luck and take care

Try this on for size, if the flue is blocked without that pressure switch the stove will continue to run pumping all kinds of crap into your house.

There are two safeties on a pellet stove that you never want bypassed when it is running the very first one is the pressure switch, the next very first one is the over temperature (hi limit) switch. Note they are on the same level, one protects you from generating very large amounts of CO and the second from generating very large amounts of hot metal and likely fire outside of the firebox.

You do whatever you want it is your stove.

Widgeonmangh said:

I can see how pumping smoke into your house would not be such a good idea. I will probably replace the pressure switch as soon as I can. The probability of the flu getting plugged at least from the chimney side of things is incredibly remote since it is a fireplace chimney. It would be more likely as a plug from ash filling the T at the stove. Still that would take a lot to fill with ash. (if I never cleaned it, but I do).

Since it is plug and play, it won't take much to replace it. Hopefully it is an on the shelf kind of part at a wood stove dealer (as well as the hose).

Thanks for the permission.

Click to expand...

I just wanted you to understand why it is there and what could happen without it. After that it is up to you, but from the sounds of things you got the message loud and clear. I'd watch out for animals crawling into the chimney as well. Plenty of things have found their way into pellet stoves from the vent system.

It is never a stove operating properly that causes an issue it is always when something out of the ordinary happens that they cause issues. Frequently multiple things have to happen before things get really bad and the funny thing is it is always a bad or bypassed safety in the mix somewhere.

Enjoy your restoration project, you'll learn a lot about the stove doing it.