Ok, I drilled 5 - 1/4” holes and filled the upper 2 knockouts. Getting ready to try it again. Not sure if this will have any effect on my error code 2, but if it wasn’t burning correctly, maybe???
I haven’t hooked the combustion air up to the outside or even tied them together inside the unit. I haven’t found that small aluminum flex yet.
Go to your local Autozone or O'Really or Pep Boy's or whatever and buy a length of expandable heat riser hose. It's the correct diameter. JC Whitney also has it online (if you want to wait. It will slip fit over the the intake tube and the transition nipple that leads to the outside of the stove as well. Use it for the tube to the outside air intake as well.
One little 'trick' I stumbled on to keep the hard carbon under control in the burn pot when roasting pellets or corn and pellets together or corn only is, reverse the direction of the 'agitator' rod in the firepot. The agitator or 'rouser' as USSC calls it, stirs the firebed and keeps the fire active.
Kind of involved but has excellent benefits as it eliminates most of the hard carbon buildup you will get and have to remove by soaking the pot in warm water and use a sharp putty knife to remove...
1. Remove the agitator rod
2. Remove the left side panel exposing the drive motor. be careful with the panel because the computer drive board is affixed to it. You can unplug the Molex connector, the T'stat connections (if you have a remote T'stat hooked up and the harness plugs as well and set aside.
3. Remove the steel cross bar that retains the drive motor, remove the spade terminals from the drive motor and remove the motor and drive extension.
4. Remove the field laminations from the motor itself taking care not to pull the armature out of the gearbox. You need to remove the outer motor bearing (2 screws). Once you have it removed, oil it.
5. Flip the field laminations 180 degrees. That will reverse the motor direction. The gearbox don't care which way it turns, all the internal reduction gearing are spur gears so direction of rotation don't matter.
6. Reinstall everything as you took it apart. Don't matter which leads hook to which terminals on the motor. it's AC not DC. Motor actuation is controlled by the brain box on the PC board.
When you reverse the agitator rod direction, the fuel bed will 'climb' the outside of the firepot instead of the inside. The outside of the pot is cooler than the inside so hard carbon formation is greatly reduced.
Found that out by accident a few seasons ago and all but eliminated my hard carbon in the burn pot issue.
If you are running straight corn like Pete does, the agitator is removed anyway and the pot becomes a 'clinker' pot.
In my case, I run field corn and pellets together in a 2-1 ratio, 2 parts field corn to 1 part hardwood pellets so I keep my agitator rod in the firepot. The pellets in the corn mitigate any clinker formation so my appliance runs like a conventional pellet only stove with the added benefit of burning a much higher BTU output fuel, shelled corn.
Pete will tell you, running corn delivers about half again as much heat for the same volume f fuel as does straight pellets. Corn burns much hotter than pellets so you can drop the PPH feed rate way down and still realize the full potential of the appliance.
I typically run mine no higher than HR3 on the OEM fueling alogrithm. Anything higher than 4 will cause the high limit on the stove to open.
Even if you run straight pellets however, the reversal of the agitator rod will mitigate hard carbon build up, a real plus as it's hard to remove from the burn pot.
