PB105 troubleshooting

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riley

New Member
Hearth Supporter
Nov 12, 2008
11
CT
As we have posted before, we've been having some issues with ignition lately and our service tech cleaned the flue pipe (which had only been in use for a little over a month) and removed the clogged screen on the end which our building department supposedly requires which is silly because if it gets clogged, the PB105 will shut down. He also replaced the board and the ignitor.

After a day and half of running normally after the ignitor replacement I went down to check on it and saw the infamous 5 blinks. I opened it up and it was full of pellets and slightly warm to the touch. I scraped it out really good and removed the plate on the front of the burnpot to empty the fines chamber which was pretty much empty.

With all dip swicthes in the off position I turned it off and then back on and went upstairs. After 30 minutes or so I went back down and saw that the burnpot was full of pellets, but again no ignition. I then reopened it and saw that the edges of the pellet pile in the burnpot were smoldering which to me indicated that it was close, but couldn't quite make it to flash-point.

Removed the pellets again flipped the 2nd dip switch to on to see if perhaps there were just too many pellets in there for it to burn properly. After 30 minutes though, no luck.

We then called the service tech (poor guy, we have his cell phone number and I think he's going to have his mail delivered to our house soon ;-) ) who spoke with someone at Harman about our issue and he mentioned putting dip switches 1 and 3 in the on position and the others off. So I changed the dip switch settings and put a piece of tape over the slit above the window on the firebox door to shut that intake off so that the only airflow would be going through the burnpot and the pellets. Ignition occurred about 15 minutes later. Once ignition occurred I removed the tape.

I and our service tech are beginning to think that perhaps the ignitor needs to get hotter/ pull more juice than the one Harman is currently using. The tech mentioned that other systems and the older Harman stoves pulled around 500 watts and this one on the PB was only pulling about 300 something watts.

Has anyone replaced the Harman's ignitor with something beefier? I would imagine doing so would void ones warranty though and potentially either not get enough juice or fry the board (I don't know much about electronics).

Also, I may have missed this in the manual, so I apologize if it's in there, but has anyone tried the ignition switch on manual once it's been fired up on auto? Will the fire stay lit all the time or will it go out like it does in auto?
 
According to the manual; when switched to manual mode, the unit will continue burning at the low rate (1.1 lbs/hr) versus the unit going out and restarting.
 
Simply switching from auto to manual won't work. What I do it start the PB in the auto mode and once there's a fire in the burnpot I turn the min temp knob to the off position, move the mode switch to manual, and then turn the minimum temp switch back to 140.

If you don't turn the PB off before switching modes it will continue to operate in whatever mode it was started in.
 
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