I'll preface this by saying that I am not a technician and honestly do not know if the things I did led to the fix, or if I just got lucky.
The stove was installed two years ago and ran awesome for two months and then the thermostat starting acting up. It would act like there was no communication between the thermostat and the stove. It would blow on high way past the preset temp. A couple of times the house would be 75+ and we have it set for 70 max. The readout would be -------- on the thermostat and the only way to clear it was to remove the thermostat face and reattach. Most of the time this worked and everything would reset. However, the frequency of this procedure increased to the point where the stove would only run properly for a couple of hours and then go crazy again. It was getting close to the end of the burn season so we lived with it and eventually forgot about it until the next season came, and wouldn't you know it, I still had the same problem. I talked to the local retailer and they told me its a common issue with these stoves. I couldn't bring myself to pay for a service call, so I decided to try a couple of things on my own.
First I did a complete tear down, and I mean complete. I pulled the stove apart and thoroughly cleaned everything. One thing I noticed was the control board was very dusty. I do not have the outdoor air kit and it appears as though the intake pulls its air right next to the control board, so dust just seemed to gravitate to the board naturally. Also I noticed that when my cat walked behind the stove, the thermostat would flash on and start freaking out. My connections were tight so I started thinking about static electricity maybe playing with the electronincs. The terminal block for the thermostat is on the back of the stove at roughly floor level, so I packed this block with an electric insulating compound made by Dow chemical. Since I've done these two things (full clean out and insulating compound) I've had no issues at all. The stove has run perfectly all season long and we've been burning pretty consistently since September, so five months now.
I've seen people have had similar issues and several service calls did not seem to fix the problem. This seems to have worked for me and for like $8 you can get the can of compressed air to blow out the board and the insulating compound to pack the terminal strip. Hopefully these things can work for other people as well.
Jim
The stove was installed two years ago and ran awesome for two months and then the thermostat starting acting up. It would act like there was no communication between the thermostat and the stove. It would blow on high way past the preset temp. A couple of times the house would be 75+ and we have it set for 70 max. The readout would be -------- on the thermostat and the only way to clear it was to remove the thermostat face and reattach. Most of the time this worked and everything would reset. However, the frequency of this procedure increased to the point where the stove would only run properly for a couple of hours and then go crazy again. It was getting close to the end of the burn season so we lived with it and eventually forgot about it until the next season came, and wouldn't you know it, I still had the same problem. I talked to the local retailer and they told me its a common issue with these stoves. I couldn't bring myself to pay for a service call, so I decided to try a couple of things on my own.
First I did a complete tear down, and I mean complete. I pulled the stove apart and thoroughly cleaned everything. One thing I noticed was the control board was very dusty. I do not have the outdoor air kit and it appears as though the intake pulls its air right next to the control board, so dust just seemed to gravitate to the board naturally. Also I noticed that when my cat walked behind the stove, the thermostat would flash on and start freaking out. My connections were tight so I started thinking about static electricity maybe playing with the electronincs. The terminal block for the thermostat is on the back of the stove at roughly floor level, so I packed this block with an electric insulating compound made by Dow chemical. Since I've done these two things (full clean out and insulating compound) I've had no issues at all. The stove has run perfectly all season long and we've been burning pretty consistently since September, so five months now.
I've seen people have had similar issues and several service calls did not seem to fix the problem. This seems to have worked for me and for like $8 you can get the can of compressed air to blow out the board and the insulating compound to pack the terminal strip. Hopefully these things can work for other people as well.
Jim
