6039 Corn/Pellet stove fixes

[Cornfusion]

I posted in another thread that I used to own an early 6039 stove and had issues trying to make it run and finally came up with a way to get it to run 100%. I decided I might as well just start a new thread that goes thru the issues and fixes. I'll try to keep this as short as I can.

It all began when my co-workers and I were all talking about buying corn stoves as corn was super cheap. 3 of us did a group buy with a local store to get a discount on 3 new 6039 stoves. None of us could get them to run. The issue was that there was very little control of the air thru the burn pot. None of us had ever owned a corn or pellet stove, so we were all starting from scratch.

Again, the biggest issue was air flow thru the burn pot. There were only 4 exhaust/vent fan settings. Setting 1 was worthless. Setting 2 didn't flow enough air....the fire looked like a candle burning in a low oxygen environment.....like when you place a glass over a candle and it's slowly using up all of the oxygen. Setting 3 was like a blow torch.....very blue, low flame that never got above the auger. No way to keep it lit. No matter what you did with the auger settings, it would either burn up all the corn in the pot and go out, or would auger too much corn and smother the fire.

My fix began with completely disconnecting the vent fan from the digital control board and wiring it up direct to a variable ceiling fan rheostat....and wired that up to a separate power cord plugged directly into the wall outlet.....infinitely variable from off to full speed. That made a HUGE difference and I thought I finally had things under control......until we got a windy day with the wind coming from the direction my vent pipe was facing. I came in the house and the whole house was full of smoke. So what happened? Well, the issue was that the wind blowing right against the wall where my exhaust exits had stalled the vent fan out. With no wind, the vent fan runs at the perfect speed for the perfect burn. With wind, the fan is trying to blow out....the wind is trying to blow in and it actually slowed the fan down to the point it was barely turning.

So....how can I turn up the fan enough so that the wind can't stall it out, but not increase the air thru the burn pot? Control the air coming IN. All of the air that goes thru the pot comes from the pedestal/ash drawer area. There is no seal between the pedestal and the stove. I bought some hi-temp caulk, pulled out the ash drawer and caulked all of the seams inside the pedestal so no air can leak in. Then took the ash drawer and made sure that when it is closed, it fits tight to the pedestal all the way around so that very little air can get past the drawer edges. Then bought a PVC ball valve to fit the intake flange on the back of the stove. Now, ALL of the air that comes into the stove has to come thru that ball valve. So, now I can turn the rheostat up to run the vent fan faster so that the wind can't stall the fan out and throttle the air volume back down by only running the PVC ball valve cracked open about 1/8"-3/16". Seems like I also had to change something about the ash clean-out ports on each side of the burn pot inside the fire box....but I don't recall exactly what I did.

Once I did all of that, I never had an issue again. I made some sharpie-marker marks on the rheostat so that I knew where it needed to be set for the perfect burn on all of the heat settings.

 

[Cornfusion]

Part II

I burned that stove like that for several years in our house basement and heated our whole house with it. I then built a shop to work in and needed a way to heat it....so I moved the 6039 out to the shop and bought a corn furnace to use in the house.

When I moved the 6039 into the shop, the shop was not insulated and I wanted more heat. I got to looking at the stove and realized that probably 90% of the heat was blowing right out of the vent pipe. The fire runs right up the insulation board, thru the holes above the insulation board and right into the exhaust fan. So....since I had the stove in the shop....with my welder....I went to work on getting more heat. I started by cutting some 1" x 1/8" steel flat stock....probably 10 of them and welded them right to the ceiling of the burn chamber....standing on edge and running from front to rear.....to act as a heat sink to absorb more heat and transfer that heat to the ceiling of the burn chamber.

Next, I cut a large steel plate that would cover the majority of the top of the burn chamber and fabbed some hanger brackets to hold it in place. So the back edge of the plate sits on top of the insulation board and the front of the plate is within about 2" of the front of the stove. So now....instead of the heat/fire following the insulation board up the back and all of the heat being sucked out the back of the stove, now the fire comes straight up to the plate, then flows FORWARD toward the front of the stove...then around the front edge of the plate and pulled thru the "heat sink" to transfer all of that heat across the ceiling of the burn chamber....so that the blower fan can pick up all that heat and blow it out the front of the stove instead of all going out the vent. This made a MASSIVE difference in heat output. The week that I did this modification, the weather was practically identical every day....same daytime highs and and lows. Before the mod, in my un-insulated pole building, I could only get a 10 degree difference in temp. If it was 30 outside, I could only get the inside up to 40. After the mod, I could run the stove on the same heat setting and get the inside temp up to the mid 50's.

 

[Jeremy6500]

Interesting info.

When you are talking about the exhaust fan settings, what kind of control board did you have? I know they changed them at some point. Mine is shown in the the pic. With it I can independently control the draft fan. I can either manually set it to a constant speed and control flow with the intake dampener, or I can put it in auto but program the low and high setting for it.

Making the heat sink for the top is interesting. It sounds like you wouldn’t want to increase the firebox heat past the integrity of the materials, but if you could increase efficiency so you can get the same temp room air using less pellets it would be nice. I actually have something kind of like that on mine from the factory. It is a large plate angled towards the front at the top of the firebox with a bunch of small holes in it. Not a great pic, but it is #11 in the parts diagram.

 

[Cornfusion]

It seems like the controls looked much like yours. It was the very first version.....and yes, I got into the programming part of it and spent hours on the phone with the guy who designed the stove trying to get it to work. The control board just simply didn't have enough settings to get the fire to burn right no matter what changes you made to the programming. Maybe it had more than 4 draft fan settings?....all I know is that no matter what changes I made to the settings or the programming, you could never get a good fire......you only had a choice between smoldering candle or blow torch. I never even knew what the fire should look like until I gave up on the control board and installed the ceiling fan rheostat.

At that point, my wife hadn't seen me for weeks as I spent 100% of my free time in the basement trying to figure out how to make the fire burn for more than 10 minutes. I remember calling her down to the basement to see the fire.....she wasn't nearly as excited about it as I was. ;-)

As for the heat exchanger part.....yeah, looks like they might have been doing something similar on your stove. I never had any issue with mine. I ran the thing 24/7 out in the shop after doing the heat exchanger mods.....no warpage or damage of any kind. I always ran the room fan at max speed to get every bit of heat out that I could, so that might be part of it? I can see how things might get too hot if you install the heat exchanger mods and then run the room fan on low?

I ran that stove for years with a clinker pot that I made after I got tired of re-building the pot stirrers and replacing stirrer motors. If memory serves, I could run for 2 days before having to empty the pot....which was nothing more than a steel box with a ton of holes drilled into it. I had a steel tab welded to the front edge so that I could open up the door, grab the tab with vice grips, run the pot outside and dump the clinker, throw it back in the stove and dump in some alcohol/oil-soaked wood pellets. Never shut the stove down to do that.....only took about a minute and just left the stove running the whole time so I didn't have to go thru the whole starting procedure every time.

 

[FirepotPete]

I posted in another thread that I used to own an early 6039 stove and had issues trying to make it run and finally came up with a way to get it to run 100%. I decided I might as well just start a new thread that goes thru the issues and fixes. I'll try to keep this as short as I can.

It all began when my co-workers and I were all talking about buying corn stoves as corn was super cheap. 3 of us did a group buy with a local store to get a discount on 3 new 6039 stoves. None of us could get them to run. The issue was that there was very little control of the air thru the burn pot. None of us had ever owned a corn or pellet stove, so we were all starting from scratch.

Again, the biggest issue was air flow thru the burn pot. There were only 4 exhaust/vent fan settings. Setting 1 was worthless. Setting 2 didn't flow enough air....the fire looked like a candle burning in a low oxygen environment.....like when you place a glass over a candle and it's slowly using up all of the oxygen. Setting 3 was like a blow torch.....very blue, low flame that never got above the auger. No way to keep it lit. No matter what you did with the auger settings, it would either burn up all the corn in the pot and go out, or would auger too much corn and smother the fire.

My fix began with completely disconnecting the vent fan from the digital control board and wiring it up direct to a variable ceiling fan rheostat....and wired that up to a separate power cord plugged directly into the wall outlet.....infinitely variable from off to full speed. That made a HUGE difference and I thought I finally had things under control......until we got a windy day with the wind coming from the direction my vent pipe was facing. I came in the house and the whole house was full of smoke. So what happened? Well, the issue was that the wind blowing right against the wall where my exhaust exits had stalled the vent fan out. With no wind, the vent fan runs at the perfect speed for the perfect burn. With wind, the fan is trying to blow out....the wind is trying to blow in and it actually slowed the fan down to the point it was barely turning.

So....how can I turn up the fan enough so that the wind can't stall it out, but not increase the air thru the burn pot? Control the air coming IN. All of the air that goes thru the pot comes from the pedestal/ash drawer area. There is no seal between the pedestal and the stove. I bought some hi-temp caulk, pulled out the ash drawer and caulked all of the seams inside the pedestal so no air can leak in. Then took the ash drawer and made sure that when it is closed, it fits tight to the pedestal all the way around so that very little air can get past the drawer edges. Then bought a PVC ball valve to fit the intake flange on the back of the stove. Now, ALL of the air that comes into the stove has to come thru that ball valve. So, now I can turn the rheostat up to run the vent fan faster so that the wind can't stall the fan out and throttle the air volume back down by only running the PVC ball valve cracked open about 1/8"-3/16". Seems like I also had to change something about the ash clean-out ports on each side of the burn pot inside the fire box....but I don't recall exactly what I did.

Once I did all of that, I never had an issue again. I made some sharpie-marker marks on the rheostat so that I knew where it needed to be set for the perfect burn on all of the heat settings.

You obviously had no clue on how to adjust the control board draft fan settings as they are infinite from the factory. Also disconnecting the draft fan from the control board, LOL. How about the wiring to the vacuum sensor? You know the one that controls the draft fan speed when a loss of vacuum is sensed. Did you just override a very important safety feature of the stove?
This entire story sounds like fiction and if it's not it's a perfect example of someone not knowing how to properly run the 6039 as sent from the factory.
In a previous statement you claimed to increase the heat by up to 3 times. Impossible as the high heat temp sensor would have had you shut down after HR3, even at 2 times the normal it would have over heated at around HR4.
Again I will remind anyone reading this that the 6039 is still being sold as the 6041 and passes the latest EPA standards for efficiency. So if that stove was so inefficient how the hell is it passing the EPA 2021 standards?
Sorry man but you didn't understand how a proportional controller worked or you would have no needed to do any of what you described to get the stove to heat properly. And the exhaust does NOT go up and straight out the chimney. It goes up and around then back down behind the firewall to about 1/3 from the bottom and then out the exhaust. The same as about 98% of all pellet stoves built in the last 20 years, nothing wrong with it at all.

 

[Cornfusion]

Wow......surely didn't mean to ruffle any feathers here. I would say you obviously never dealt with the original version 1 of this stove when they first came to market. There was nothing "infinite" about the draft fan settings.....no matter how much you fiddled around in programming mode. I was in direct contact with the person WHO DESIGNED THE STOVE on multiple occasions. Yes, I fully and completely knew everything there was to know about the draft fan settings and going into the "programming mode" of the controls to try to make changes to make the stove work. Yes, the manufacturer was forced to make several changes to the programming on the next year's model to make them work.....because no one that I talked to who owned the original versions (very first units sold during the first year of production) could keep a fire in them for more than an hour. Again.....the draft fan settings simply did not allow any "fine tuning". Setting 1 was a joke. Setting 2 was too slow. Setting 3 was too fast. Setting 4 was WAY too fast. There was no way to adjust it to anything in-between using the factory controls.

No, I didn't override any of the safties built into the stove. The changes I made were for the sole purpose of CREATING MORE VACCUM inside the stove than there ever could have been before.....so that it would NEVER FILL MY HOUSE WITH SMOKE AGAIN......which it never did. No, my stove never overheated....never warped the door....never warped the stove. After the mods were done and I could get it burning the way it should have been able to burn from the factory, I never, ever had the fire go out or had it stop heating with the exception of one time when a small chunk of corn cob got jammed in the auger and stopped the corn from feeding. The auger still ran, but no corn could get past the cob chunk. I would fill the hopper and we'd leave for the whole weekend and come back Sunday night and it would still be running.

I could give a rip about EPA ratings. All they care about are emissions.....making sure the fuel is completely burned.....not how many BTU's are transferred from the fire into your home or shop. Maybe you can explain why the temp in my shop more than doubled with the stove set to the same settings as before and the outside temp and conditions same as before?

Not sure why all of this free information makes you so upset?

 

[FirepotPete]

Wow......surely didn't mean to ruffle any feathers here. I would say you obviously never dealt with the original version 1 of this stove when they first came to market. There was nothing "infinite" about the draft fan settings.....no matter how much you fiddled around in programming mode. I was in direct contact with the person WHO DESIGNED THE STOVE on multiple occasions. Yes, I fully and completely knew everything there was to know about the draft fan settings and going into the "programming mode" of the controls to try to make changes to make the stove work. Yes, the manufacturer was forced to make several changes to the programming on the next year's model to make them work.....because no one that I talked to who owned the original versions (very first units sold during the first year of production) could keep a fire in them for more than an hour. Again.....the draft fan settings simply did not allow any "fine tuning". Setting 1 was a joke. Setting 2 was too slow. Setting 3 was too fast. Setting 4 was WAY too fast. There was no way to adjust it to anything in-between using the factory controls.

No, I didn't override any of the safties built into the stove. The changes I made were for the sole purpose of CREATING MORE VACCUM inside the stove than there ever could have been before.....so that it would NEVER FILL MY HOUSE WITH SMOKE AGAIN......which it never did. No, my stove never overheated....never warped the door....never warped the stove. After the mods were done and I could get it burning the way it should have been able to burn from the factory, I never, ever had the fire go out or had it stop heating with the exception of one time when a small chunk of corn cob got jammed in the auger and stopped the corn from feeding. The auger still ran, but no corn could get past the cob chunk. I would fill the hopper and we'd leave for the whole weekend and come back Sunday night and it would still be running.

I could give a rip about EPA ratings. All they care about are emissions.....making sure the fuel is completely burned.....not how many BTU's are transferred from the fire into your home or shop. Maybe you can explain why the temp in my shop more than doubled with the stove set to the same settings as before and the outside temp and conditions same as before?

Not sure why all of this free information makes you so upset?

Because some of it is dangerous.

 

[Cornfusion]

So dangerous that I used that stove as my primary heat source for the better part of a decade with zero problems.....

Maybe you'd like to explain what I did that was dangerous? What do you think could have happened as a result of getting more heat out of less fuel or separating the vent fan from the control board or sealing up the pedestal or restricting the incoming air to create more vacuum so my house didn't fill with smoke?

USSC didn't build the stove to be as efficient as possible. They built it to sell at a profit.

If the stove worked just fine as-is, how did I manage to sell $7,500 worth of "fix-it" instruction packs on ebay at $20 a pop?