First, you guys have been a great source of information for me, we just started burning pellets and so far I've been able to find everything that I've need to know to get up and running. Me and my wife enjoyed our new (but very old) stove so much we decided to update a little and give our original one to her parents. We started out with a 1995 25-pdv, it works great, real behemoth of a thing. I found a newer 2005 25-pdve pretty cheep and we got it, even came with a spare 2002ish stove. I figure I can pull the motors out and rebuild them to keep us up and running. The guys I got if from said that it heat exchanger is cracked on the spare so it shouldn't be used anymore. I've yet to verify that.
That's not my problem though... Our new stove either works too well or isn't working right. Running on 1 3 and a bottom setting of 1 3 1 its still producing way too much heat. At first I though I just didn't clean it enough so I cleaned it again, unless I missed some magical way of cleaning out the exchanger I'm not seeing anything more that I can clean up. Next I did a reset on the board per your guys instructions, bottom three came back as 6 4 1 and a heat setting of A (if that's what that's called) which I changed to D. I've since adjusted the bottom three back down to what I have them, though I can only really test things out for a few hrs before I have to shut down due to the temp in the house. On the old stove when set on low it would burn real good when it dumped more fuel and then die out for a little and repeat, above the window on the stove being around 200 degrees when checked with my infrared thermometer. The new stove has a pretty decent fire all the time and the same place on the stove is more like 300-400 degrees. If I really let it go its been up over 600, which I'm not really comfortable with. I could touch the top of the old one when it was running, I wouldn't even think of doing that with this one.
The other morning I emptied the hopper and pulled out the restrictor plate (it was as closed as it could be) and drilled another hole in it to close it off even more. Didn't seem to make much difference. One of my theories is that its getting too much fuel. Watching the bottom feed it seemed like it was moving too fast, I was counting maybe 2 to 2.5 rpm, don't really have a good way of watching the top. Its possible that the people before me put in the wrong parts... need to pull the back tonight and check the labels.
The other thing its doing that I'm not sure about is the auto startup. Its one of the main reasons we upgraded. Right now if you press the on button it will start feeding and get a nice fire going but by the time its burning the burn pot is full of pellets a good inch deep. This produces a huge fire, the second time I let it auto start up it was pushing un-burned pellets out the front of the burn pot. My first guess for this is the ignitor is just bad so I've been manually lighting it. But having no idea how exactly that works I'm not sure, this may be another symptom of my over feeding. I was also thinking maybe its the thermostat? This start up has been leaving a lot of ash in the burn pot also, the old stove would blow the ash out pretty quickly such that when you shut it down there wouldn't be much in it to clean up, just scraping off the carbon. This one I'm using my putty knife to scoop it out, probably a good quarter to half cup in there.
At this point I'm open to things to try or you guys just telling me that this is the way it works. I have an EE degree and was tempted to pull the scope out and take a look at what the control board is doing but there are a a lot of things going on at once in this thing. If that's the kind of info we need to get the thing running right just say the word and I'll start probing (or pounding with the sledge either works
)
That's not my problem though... Our new stove either works too well or isn't working right. Running on 1 3 and a bottom setting of 1 3 1 its still producing way too much heat. At first I though I just didn't clean it enough so I cleaned it again, unless I missed some magical way of cleaning out the exchanger I'm not seeing anything more that I can clean up. Next I did a reset on the board per your guys instructions, bottom three came back as 6 4 1 and a heat setting of A (if that's what that's called) which I changed to D. I've since adjusted the bottom three back down to what I have them, though I can only really test things out for a few hrs before I have to shut down due to the temp in the house. On the old stove when set on low it would burn real good when it dumped more fuel and then die out for a little and repeat, above the window on the stove being around 200 degrees when checked with my infrared thermometer. The new stove has a pretty decent fire all the time and the same place on the stove is more like 300-400 degrees. If I really let it go its been up over 600, which I'm not really comfortable with. I could touch the top of the old one when it was running, I wouldn't even think of doing that with this one.
The other morning I emptied the hopper and pulled out the restrictor plate (it was as closed as it could be) and drilled another hole in it to close it off even more. Didn't seem to make much difference. One of my theories is that its getting too much fuel. Watching the bottom feed it seemed like it was moving too fast, I was counting maybe 2 to 2.5 rpm, don't really have a good way of watching the top. Its possible that the people before me put in the wrong parts... need to pull the back tonight and check the labels.
The other thing its doing that I'm not sure about is the auto startup. Its one of the main reasons we upgraded. Right now if you press the on button it will start feeding and get a nice fire going but by the time its burning the burn pot is full of pellets a good inch deep. This produces a huge fire, the second time I let it auto start up it was pushing un-burned pellets out the front of the burn pot. My first guess for this is the ignitor is just bad so I've been manually lighting it. But having no idea how exactly that works I'm not sure, this may be another symptom of my over feeding. I was also thinking maybe its the thermostat? This start up has been leaving a lot of ash in the burn pot also, the old stove would blow the ash out pretty quickly such that when you shut it down there wouldn't be much in it to clean up, just scraping off the carbon. This one I'm using my putty knife to scoop it out, probably a good quarter to half cup in there.
At this point I'm open to things to try or you guys just telling me that this is the way it works. I have an EE degree and was tempted to pull the scope out and take a look at what the control board is doing but there are a a lot of things going on at once in this thing. If that's the kind of info we need to get the thing running right just say the word and I'll start probing (or pounding with the sledge either works
)
