I am hoping that someone out there in “pelletland” can help me with a stove problem that started to manifest itself just a few of days ago. A little history, I have been using pellet stove technology as my sole heating source since we bought our first Whitfield Advantage in 1988, and as such, have had to deal with a all sorts of performance issues and parts failures. Now I currently own a Travis Industries, Avalon Astoria. It was new in the fall of 2003 and has worked perfectly since I installed it, that is, until recently. It is starting to exhibit many of the problems another stove owner described on this forum; lazy flame, excessive sooting throughout, short burn time, and, it extinguishes itself within fifteen minutes or so. I performed a major clean out of the stove, inside and out, this past summer using both vacuum and air. I thoroughly brush cleaned the vent run at the same time. The vent run has a horizontal path of less than 2 feet straight out from the back of the stove, one 90 degree turn with a clean out, then a straight shot up an existing masonry chimney using 4 inch Simpson vent pipe with a 5 foot flex pipe to get through the old damper offset.
On 2/24/07, I did a repeat cleaning performance, thinking that there might be an exhaust/combustion airflow blockage somewhere, mostly because I was forced to change brands of pellets from my normal this winter. This other brand, I thought, had an abnormally excessive amount of ash build up. It took me most of Saturday to do a thorough job, and afterwards, I started the stove up in manual mode as usual. The combustion airflow starts out like normal, the auger feeds pellets into the hopper and the igniter lights the fire…great! The fire burns vigorously, as it should, the row of heat output LED’s on the right of the control panel are all lit and finally go out to the preset feed rate setting when the temp switch cuts in/out. Then the stove starts to take a nosedive and the combustion motor slows down to a crawl. In fact, I watched it almost stall to less than 1000 RPM’s at times. Since I had just cleaned the stove and went back to my previous pellet grade type, this inability to keep the stove going has me completely puzzled.
At first, I thought it must be the exhaust/combustion motor that was the culprit, but now I am not sure that is not the control board (maybe, both)? The airflow starts out fine in the start up mode, but then diminishes to almost nothing when the electronics switch out of their start up settings. I am used to replacing parts and performing maintenance based on the manufacturers recommendations. This would not be foreign to me. So, does anyone have any thoughts, recommendations, possible solutions? Any help will be eagerly anticipated, considered and much appreciated.
The stove S/N, is 2303-926404, with all it's original parts and electronics
Thanks
Sierra Smoker
On 2/24/07, I did a repeat cleaning performance, thinking that there might be an exhaust/combustion airflow blockage somewhere, mostly because I was forced to change brands of pellets from my normal this winter. This other brand, I thought, had an abnormally excessive amount of ash build up. It took me most of Saturday to do a thorough job, and afterwards, I started the stove up in manual mode as usual. The combustion airflow starts out like normal, the auger feeds pellets into the hopper and the igniter lights the fire…great! The fire burns vigorously, as it should, the row of heat output LED’s on the right of the control panel are all lit and finally go out to the preset feed rate setting when the temp switch cuts in/out. Then the stove starts to take a nosedive and the combustion motor slows down to a crawl. In fact, I watched it almost stall to less than 1000 RPM’s at times. Since I had just cleaned the stove and went back to my previous pellet grade type, this inability to keep the stove going has me completely puzzled.
At first, I thought it must be the exhaust/combustion motor that was the culprit, but now I am not sure that is not the control board (maybe, both)? The airflow starts out fine in the start up mode, but then diminishes to almost nothing when the electronics switch out of their start up settings. I am used to replacing parts and performing maintenance based on the manufacturers recommendations. This would not be foreign to me. So, does anyone have any thoughts, recommendations, possible solutions? Any help will be eagerly anticipated, considered and much appreciated.
The stove S/N, is 2303-926404, with all it's original parts and electronics
Thanks
Sierra Smoker
