Alternate Convection Blower Wiring

[jmhunt]

Hi All -
New member to the forum, although I have been here over the past couple of years to get insights into maintaining and troubleshooting my Quadrafire Santa Fe. I have really appreciated the knowledge, insights and tweeks here.

After reading this thread:
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/quadrafire-castile-experiment.58216/
I've ordered my springs for the heat exchanger tubes and I'm getting ready to wire my convection blower to run on high.

Which leads to this post. My stove is in my finished basement in which we have a small home theater setup and which we do some partying / entertaining with friends. So, while most of the time I want the convection blower to run on HIGH to get heat into the house, there are times I want to run on LOW.

My thoughts are now to install a switch that would allow me to run the blower on HIGH or to run via the control box setting. My question is will switching the power via this setup cause any damage to the control box (not seeing the load of the fan then being "instantaneously" loaded when the switch is thrown? I have even thought about a 3 position switch with the middle being not connected so when switching it comes to a place where there is no voltage or load, then switching to the box.

Your thoughts?

Thanks -

J Mark

 

[DMKNLD]

Hey J Mark and welcome, officially, to the forum.

B-mod was the originator of this Quad mod, who still has an active membership as I can tell, but he hasn't posted here since the winter of 2014. You can try contacting him via the forum's private messaging link to get his take on your 'modification of the modification' thoughts, on the chance that he still monitors this site. He helped me allot when I did this wiring mod on my Castile, given my electrical knowledge level being somewhere between zero and the null set !

Essentially you are feeding both the #1 convection fan snap disk and the #3 safety snap disk with the same fused 110V power supply, while wiring it to still allow the critical safety back-up of the #3 snap disc to open if you get a drop chute over-fire situation. In order to keep that safety in place the wiring mod taps the input side of the #3 disc versus the output side, and wires it into the #1 disc, which leaves one of the wires to the #1 disc unconnected.

Since the rest of the Quad start-up sequence depends on the #3 disc being closed, it's my thought that putting a 3 position switch in the circuit would cut the power to the #3 disc, and thus shut down the stove, when in the neutral switch position. As I can tell, with B-mods wiring set-up it would seem that the #1 snap disc wire would need to be connected in order for the stove to run via the normal control box setting.

Others with more electrical knowledge than me will hopefully chime in, but as I understand it you have the choice to either have the convection blower wired to run on high all the time with this wiring mod, or you have to leave it as is and have the control box adjust the blower speed.

Regards, DK