USSC 6041 Burnt Out Third Auger Motor This Winter
- Thread starter Caleb Joens
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Good news, when I went home and changed the fuse on the stove the motor was still working so my stove is up and running. The other two motors appear to be burnt out though, so I got lucky with one of them. Now I just have to figure out how to do a daily scrape of the burnpot without blowing the motor until the replacement control board gets in. Lake Girl: I do have the stove on a surge protector, and will be getting a battery backup for it soon I hope. Bob Bare: Checking the ground is a good idea, I will make sure to do that when I install the control board.
By my calculations if I had to burn propane it would have cost me an additional $28/day so $280 by time I was up and running again. Plus, I would have had a colder family room and warmer bedrooms neither of which sounds appealing.
By my calculations if I had to burn propane it would have cost me an additional $28/day so $280 by time I was up and running again. Plus, I would have had a colder family room and warmer bedrooms neither of which sounds appealing.
Harvey Schneider
Minister of Fire
What is still bothering me is that there is nothing, I can conceive of, that the control board can do that will burn out a motor.
You still haven't told us what is wrong with the other two motors. Are the coils burned out? Are the gears striped? Are they jammed? The answers to these questions can lead to understanding what is happening.
You can replace motors until the manufacturer tells you to pay for them, but putting another motor into a situation that "burned out" two in a row is not a reasonable thing to do. There are clues in front of you already; it happens when you open the door to clean.
A simple work around for now. before you open the door, hit the stop button. The stove will not be feeding fuel if it is in shutdown mode, so the motor will have no power.
It is possible that your problem is mechanical in nature. The thermal shock of opening the door may be causing the auger to bind in its flight tube.
Good luck.
I agree that I cannot think of how a control board could burn out the motors, but when I called the company they made it sound like this is a common result of a bad control board. I don't know if a switch of some sort doesn't close properly and a charge builds up so when the vacuum switch is closed it allows the charge to dissipate across the auger motor blowing it out. I really only have a basic understanding of circuit boards and electric motors so it is difficult to imagine what kind of actions the control board could be doing to cause this.
The gear box is fine, I took them apart and all of the gears look in tact and when I spin the armature the gears all move and the shaft rotates. I don't believe it to be a jam, at least with this last motor because I did not do anything other than replace the fuse and it worked fine. I would think that if the auger were jammed it would not have cleared itself and I would have blown the fuse again. I would assume the coil is burnt out, I bought a multimeter on the way home yesterday but I did not get the chance to play with the other motors yet. Not to get in to too much personal details, but I have a six month old and my wife works opposite shifts from me so I rarely get time to play with stuff anymore.
If the control board does not fix the issue it will be time to start discussing a replacement stove from them, but I am willing to work with the manufacturer to some extent to get this issue fixed. I have no intentions of getting stuck with a lemon stove that is not covered under warranty.
As for the workaround, pushing the off button only puts the stove into shutdown mode which still periodically operates the auger motor to ensure that pellets in the shoot are not begin to burn. This take up to an hour to actually shut the stove down to the point that the auger motor no longer tries to push pellets out. My first idea was to open the hopper lid, which has a kill switch for the auger motor, I thought this would prevent the auger from popping the fuse, but instead when I shut the hopper lid the fuse popped. Although the motor was not ruined this time, so it might have helped with the problem, just didn't prevent the fuse from popping.
Thanks for all of the help so far.
The gear box is fine, I took them apart and all of the gears look in tact and when I spin the armature the gears all move and the shaft rotates. I don't believe it to be a jam, at least with this last motor because I did not do anything other than replace the fuse and it worked fine. I would think that if the auger were jammed it would not have cleared itself and I would have blown the fuse again. I would assume the coil is burnt out, I bought a multimeter on the way home yesterday but I did not get the chance to play with the other motors yet. Not to get in to too much personal details, but I have a six month old and my wife works opposite shifts from me so I rarely get time to play with stuff anymore.
If the control board does not fix the issue it will be time to start discussing a replacement stove from them, but I am willing to work with the manufacturer to some extent to get this issue fixed. I have no intentions of getting stuck with a lemon stove that is not covered under warranty.
As for the workaround, pushing the off button only puts the stove into shutdown mode which still periodically operates the auger motor to ensure that pellets in the shoot are not begin to burn. This take up to an hour to actually shut the stove down to the point that the auger motor no longer tries to push pellets out. My first idea was to open the hopper lid, which has a kill switch for the auger motor, I thought this would prevent the auger from popping the fuse, but instead when I shut the hopper lid the fuse popped. Although the motor was not ruined this time, so it might have helped with the problem, just didn't prevent the fuse from popping.
Thanks for all of the help so far.
so I measured the resistance across the other "burnt out" motor and it was 14. Is this far enough from the 18 that should be expected to declair the motor dead?
Harvey Schneider
Minister of Fire
No. That is okay. The dc resistance is an indication of the approximate amount of wire. The fact that it isn't an infinite resistance means it isn't burned out. While 14 is a bit lower than I would expect, if the coil doesn't look scorched, it is okay. If you put that motor on a cheater cord it should run.
I usually plug my cheater cord into a power strip that has it's own circuit breaker. The breakers on power strips tend to be much faster then the break in you power distribution panel. Also allows me to use the switch on the strip to apply power.
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