Install a thermostat to turn an Ashley AP5660 on and off

[Rog K]

I have an Ashley AP5660 pellet stove. When I purchased it the literature stated that it was fully automatic and that it could be thermostat controlled. I took this to mean that the thermostat would turn it on and off but it does not. The T-stat only turns it up and down. At that time I accepted it for it is what it is.

A couple of years later I purchased an Englander pellet stove that is thermostatically controlled and it does turn on and off. It is great and uses a lot less pellets especially at night.

My son recently purchased a pellet stove from yet another manufacture and ran into the same thing as I did with the Ashley. He contacted the manufacture and they sent him instructions on how to wire a thermostat into the circuit board so that it will turn on and off. It also works great.

Has anyone figured out how to do this with an Ashley/US Stove. Possibly wiring into the switch?

 

[tlc1976]

I did this a long time ago on a King stove but it was a much larger board with wired connections, matrix membrane and had separate on/off buttons. Easy.

Does your 5660 have the bar graph display? If so it’s just like mine. Single on/off button and it’s all integrated and tiny. I decided not to mess with it directly. In addition to tapping into the power button, I’d have to detect the exhaust fan being on, or a combination of the board LED and the low limit switch to identify the status of the stove so I didn’t have it hit the power button again.

What I did was get a BroadLink RM4 with temp/humidity sensor in the cable, and programmed the stove remote into it. It alerts me on my phone to the house temp and I can turn the stove on or off while I’m away. I also put up a cheap WiFi camera so I can monitor the stove operation, know if I’ve got a noisy bearing, etc. Supposedly you can integrate this with IFTTT and with that you could probably set up enough conditions so the stove didn’t trigger twice too soon.

Another option is to do the King stove thing with a 1 second pulse relay controlled by a thermostat, and hack it into the stove remote power button to a fixture aimed at the stove.

All in all this is only for shoulder season, so when I’m home I turn the stove off if the house is too warm, or on if it’s too cold. When I’m gone I don’t care as long as I get it reasonably warm by the time I get home. Shoulder season I don’t have to worry about freezing pipes, but it would alert me if we had a cold snap anyway, and if not I do have backup heat.