Avalon Newport shut down unexpectedly

[ChandlerR]

All right, this is one of those "A friend of mine has this problem" questions...My partner at work has a 2002 Avalon. He is religious in the maintenance and I showed him how to do the leaf blower trick. He told me today that the stove was running fine...he went to bed and woke up to a chilly house. Looking at the stove he said the fault light was blinking and looking into the firepot he saw unburned pellets. He said he had never had this happen before. My guess is that the fire simply went out...He was running it on low with the damper set in the minimum position..Maybe the pellets were damp, maybe not enough air. This has happened three times. Every time it restarts right up.
Does anyone have any suggestions I can give him? (Other than join this forum?)


Chandler

 

[imacman]

I had the fire go out on my Astoria a few times running on low-low (1 green light heat setting). It's hard to tell if your friends went out because of too much air "blowing the fire out", or too little (pellets burned too slow, and incoming new ones simply smothered the embers), without actually seeing it happen.

Does he run it off a stat? If not, I'd suggest he put the stove on a programmable one, and put the stove on 2nd green light heat setting.

 

[FireintheHole]

I just had my Hudson River Westpoint go out Saturday a.m. running on the "1" setting and saw a clump in the burn pot.
When I cleaned it out I saw that the burn pot was over 1/2 clogged with unburned pieces of pellets. Yesterday I had put a bag
in the hopper that had a few clumps in the bag and didn't think of it then, it might have had a bit more moisture .
I turned the stove up to "2" to burn through this bag, and so far it's been good.
If I go by the specs, "1" is about 1.95 lbs per hour and 2 is about 3.25 lbs per hour.
( This is the first time my stove went out, but I've only had it for 2 1/2 weeks.)

 

[FireintheHole]

I just had my Hudson River Westpoint go out Saturday a.m. running on the "1" setting and saw a clump in the burn pot.
When I cleaned it out I saw that the burn pot was over 1/2 clogged with unburned pieces of pellets. Yesterday I had put a bag
in the hopper that had a few clumps in the bag and didn't think of it then, it might have had a bit more moisture .
I turned the stove up to "2" to burn through this bag, and so far it's been good.
If I go by the specs, "1" is about 1.95 lbs per hour and 2 is about 3.25 lbs per hour.
( This is the first time my stove went out, but I've only had it for 2 1/2 weeks.)

So far , so good. stove's been working fine. Burning at night for app. 12 hours for a few days.

 

[ChandlerR]

Well, it seems that the problem was too much combustion air and too slow feed rate. The pellets in the pot burned up and the new ones coming in couldn't ignite, essentially smothering the fire. He closed the combustion damper and sped up the feed rate a notch and it ran fine.
Of course he didn't need it today with temps near 70!

Chandler