Buzzing blower

[gr8shot]

I'll start out by saying I'm fairly mechanically inclined, but this is annoying the heck out of me. Osburn 2400 insert that we've had for about a year now. Absolutely love the stove, it mostly heats our entire house. But the blower vibrates and buzzes horribly. It's getting the best of me. Turn the blower on low and it's quiet. Turn it on high and it'll be quiet for maybe 1-2 minutes, then it develops a metal on metal rattle/buzz thats pretty loud. I can walk up and give the blower a little bump with my hand or foot, and sometimes the rattle goes away for 5 seconds, sometimes a couple minutes. But it always comes back. If I remove the blower and run it without being attached to the stove, there's no rattle at all. It's only when it's connected to the stove. I've cleaned out all the dust from the blower to minimize balance issues. I've tried shimming the blower from the bottom to make it sit tighter against the ash shelf. I've tried shimming it from the top too. Nothing seems to fix it. Normally with metal on metal rattles, I look for areas of bare metal where two pieces of metal are contacting each other. I can't find any places like that, so I don't even know exactly where it's rattling at.

It's $250+ for a new blower, so thats kind of out of the question, unless this one suddenly dies.

I've also emailed Osburn's customer service about the issue with a very detailed and descriptive email of the issue. While they did respond, it was very generic and short, and not helpful at all. I know this isn't an overly common stove, but curious if anyone has had issues like this and found a way to solve it. The root cause is obviously something in the blower wheels being out of balance, causing the shake. But I'm not able to find anything visibly wrong thats causing the squirrel cages to be out of balance.

Any insight would be awesome! Thanks!

 

[begreen]

This might just be build up on the squirrel cage fins causing an imbalance. Take the blower out and give it a thorough cleaning to see if that fixes the problem.

 

[gr8shot]

I've cleaned it until I it looks like new, a couple times. It's something in the wheels themselves that seem to be out of balance.

 

[moresnow]

Any way to reinforce/shim/stiffen the mount location?

 

[gr8shot]

I've tried to shim it from the bottom, to hold the blower tight against the underside of the ash shelf, it does help to some degree, and thats how we have it currently. But the rattle is still there. It's just not as loud.

 

[moresnow]

Is there a gasket at the mount location? If there isnt, maybe installing some would cure it?

 

[marty319]

I would get after sbi again.tell them you want a proper blower

 

[gr8shot]

The blower itself is mounted on rubber isolators to dampen the vibration. The frustrating part is that it is silent when I pull it off the stove. So it's hard to pin point where it's coming from.

 

[begreen]

This is just a guess, it might be that the squirrel cage is rubbing against the shroud as centrifugal force at high speed nudges the blades slightly outward? Or a sloppy end bearing is allowing this to happen?

Also, look downstream from the blower for anything that might rattle. This could be a diverter or even a wire.

 

[JWJKSwanson]

The blower itself is mounted on rubber isolators to dampen the vibration. The frustrating part is that it is silent when I pull it off the stove. So it's hard to pin point where it's coming from.

Hi there: Jimbo here.
Found your thread. I have the exact same issue you had (have).
Was wondering if you found a solution?
Please advise if you did.
Much appreciated.

 

[nola mike]

I'll start out by saying I'm fairly mechanically inclined, but this is annoying the heck out of me. Osburn 2400 insert that we've had for about a year now. Absolutely love the stove, it mostly heats our entire house. But the blower vibrates and buzzes horribly. It's getting the best of me. Turn the blower on low and it's quiet. Turn it on high and it'll be quiet for maybe 1-2 minutes, then it develops a metal on metal rattle/buzz thats pretty loud.

My SBI stove has/had the same problem since new. Issue on mine is that the whole stove housing is vibrating, and when it hits that resonant frequency it makes a racket. My solutions:
1. Run the blower at a different speed. Honestly, I think that as long as you have air circulating back there, the heating is the same. I used to run mine on high all the time, now it's always low (and lower blower noise/vibrations)
2. Stick a large magnet on the front of the housing. I used a magnet from a speaker (for some reason, I love collecting magnets from old speakers), but anything with some mass would work (think dynamat from car stereo applications).

 

[JWJKSwanson]

My SBI stove has/had the same problem since new. Issue on mine is that the whole stove housing is vibrating, and when it hits that resonant frequency it makes a racket. My solutions:
1. Run the blower at a different speed. Honestly, I think that as long as you have air circulating back there, the heating is the same. I used to run mine on high all the time, now it's always low (and lower blower noise/vibrations)
2. Stick a large magnet on the front of the housing. I used a magnet from a speaker (for some reason, I love collecting magnets from old speakers), but anything with some mass would work (think dynamat from car stereo applications).

The different speeds don't make a difference. Will check on a magnet after cleaning the heck out of it. Thanks.

 

[gr8shot]

My SBI stove has/had the same problem since new. Issue on mine is that the whole stove housing is vibrating, and when it hits that resonant frequency it makes a racket. My solutions:
1. Run the blower at a different speed. Honestly, I think that as long as you have air circulating back there, the heating is the same. I used to run mine on high all the time, now it's always low (and lower blower noise/vibrations)
2. Stick a large magnet on the front of the housing. I used a magnet from a speaker (for some reason, I love collecting magnets from old speakers), but anything with some mass would work (think dynamat from car stereo applications).

In our house it's a huge difference between low and high speed. But we're using the stove primarily as our main heat source, with an electric furnace as a backup that we hate to run since it's so expensive. We run the stove hard and burn it hot, so it's on high speed almost all of the time.

I finally got really frustrated and kept shoving shims up under every corner of the blower until the thing was wedged super tight up against the ash shelf. That seemed to get rid of about 90% of the rattle. Enough to be tolerable. Every once in a while it will still start making noise. But a slight kick will fix it usually lol. It shouldn't take this much work to get rid of the rattle/buzz. But I've got it to where it's manageable for now.