Englander stove cycles convection fan

[dwizum]

Hi all,

I have a TRPAH-55 stove from England Stove Works. I've been running it for 4 or 5 years without any real issues, I love the stove.

Over the last month, the convection (room air) blower started cycling. It'll run for a few hours, then shut off for 20 minutes, then run again, etc. I know this would be normal behavior if the low temp switch is being triggered and the stove thinks it's not hot enough to run the room air blower, but that's definitely not the case - it is doing this regardless of settings, it'll do it even on high feed rates when the stove is piping hot. The cycles seem consistent regardless of the temp of the stove, in fact.

Any thoughts? New temp sensor, new blower? I'm wondering if the blower has some sort of resettable thermal fuse in it, and it's shutting itself off because it's overheating?

In the spirit of full disclosure, this happens on the same frequency regardless of settings, brand of pellet, state of cleanliness, etc. I was wondering if there was built up ash somewhere causing a problem so I did the leaf blower cleanout method so the stove is very clean internally - and it's still cycling. Thoughts?

 

[heat seeker]

Have you blown out the windings of the motor itself? They get clogged with dust and the motor overheats. Compressed air works well, a shop vac doesn't provide enough pressure to get the job done.

 

[dwizum]

I will give that a try.

Would I take that as confirmation that the blower motor has some sort of built in thermal protection? It makes sense based on the regularity with which it cycles and the independence from the heat setting (which I would imagine would impact the reading on the temp sensor inside the stove itself)

 

[heat seeker]

Yes, as far as I know, all of these little motors have a thermal switch buried in the windings to prevent overheating.

 

[ericofmaine]

One other thing to check is that your Air On Temp button (one of the "bottom 3 buttons") is still set to 1. Mine got changed once (not sure how... kids perhaps?) and it did something similar. That said, I'd still default to cleaning the motor first.

Eric