New stove auger problem

[Jhawknseattle]

Bought a brand new lopi deerfield in December has been working great. Just got back from a week long vacation and fires it up and it's giving me a code. The lcd monitor portion says "auger motor (encoder)". When it starts up everything is normal pellets begin to feed into the platform, then the blower motor kicks on (which that normally doesn't happen for 15 minutes or so) and it instantly generates that code. I'm calling the company I bought it from Monday for them to look at it but thought I'd post it here. I've burned about 2 tons so far and have been consistent with the cleaning. I have the company scheduled to come out for the yearly cleaning at the end of the month. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Vulpoid]

This happened to me this morning. Did you ever figure out what was going on?
Thanks!

 

[Jhawknseattle]

Yes, it's still under warranty so the technician came out and tried cleaning the sensor off. Apparently if it gets dirty, it can cause that issue. That didn't work, so he ended up replacing the motor (believe it was the direct push auger motor) and worked immediately.

 

[Overfireinthehole]

Were you burning a very long pellet? The new Lopis can handle a few long pellets but any stove willl bog down if given too many pellets over an inch. Did they also clean everything (pot to termination) to make sure it wasn’t a vacuum related error. I’m not very familiar with the new Deerfield’s but I assume that loss in vacuum will kill the auger motor as that’s how pretty much all pellet stoves built in the last 10-15 years work. A common culprit on stoves that have a vacuum line tying into your exhaust plenum is a piece of ash lodged in the hose causing intermittent losses in vacuum. Here’s a link to your manual. Hopefully the new motor fixed it but a thorough cleaning is always a good call before throwing new parts at a stove.
(broken link removed to https://www.lopistoves.com/TravisDocs/17602010.pdf)

 

[Jhawknseattle]

Yeah I've been very thorough on cleanings and I've been burning high quality softwood pellets, all douglas fir. As I mentioned, it's still under warranty so the dealer came out to do the annual clean on it (which he did first) and tried starting it up and it still wouldn't fire up. He swapped out the motor and it worked instantly. No charge for me besides the full clean which I had scheduled anyway, they have a deal where they clean out everything including the chimney for 159 from April through May.

 

[Overfireinthehole]

Yeah I've been very thorough on cleanings and I've been burning high quality softwood pellets, all douglas fir. As I mentioned, it's still under warranty so the dealer came out to do the annual clean on it (which he did first) and tried starting it up and it still wouldn't fire up. He swapped out the motor and it worked instantly. No charge for me besides the full clean which I had scheduled anyway, they have a deal where they clean out everything including the chimney for 159 from April through May.

We do it for 119 all summer