Harman Advance feed rate went nuts!!

[vtattebury]

Hi all—

I have an older Harman Advance, actually my second advance since I loved the other one so much.

On both stoves, the starting point of “4” seemed to work great on the feed rate. Not many unburned pellets, burn was far enough from the pot edge, etc.

So today I lit up the stove (it has been out for a couple of weeks), and decided to back off the feed rate a smidge since it seemed to be a little too fast.
I came back 20 minutes later and WHOA! It was feeding so many pellets, actual flaming pellets were piling up into the ash box. Seemed like something got stuck and it was on high. It wasn’t a constant feed— it still cycled on and off, just way too much.
Other problem was when I turned the stove off to try to put out the fire, it never actually went out!! It kept feeding, even though the status light was off!!

So now unfortunately I’m thinking it’s the control board or the knob controllers going haywire. I gave them a cleaning when I first got the stove since it clearly hadn’t been well maintained and the knobs were acting weird.
So— I guess, any thoughts? Any good reset for the control board? I don’t trust the stove now to run overnight or when I’m gone if the ash box catches fire!!

 

[Washed-Up]

Pull the knobs/potentiometers off and spray them with contact cleaner while rotating them back and forth, also check your esp

 

[vtattebury]

Yeah, I got the special cleaning spray and did that last year. I’ll do it again. Trying to remember if I cleaned the ESP with alcohol this year.

Update is after I let the fire burn out and unplugged, it seems to be acting normally. I’m just not quite sure I trust it yet though!

thx

 

[Harman Lover 007]

I’ve had that happen a few times over the years. It always occurred when starting the stove from stone cold. Make sure you don’t have a carbon “speed bump” in the burn pot and that the igniter isn’t clogged with ash. Back the feed rate off to 3.5 and see how it goes.