Pellet stove and UPS sizing

[DougF]

Hi,

This is I guess a general question regarding pellet stoves. Just purchased a QuadraFire 1200 stove.
Around here,Howard County Maryland , there are power glitches on occasion so I am interested in protecting the stove and thought perhaps a UPS might help. Any suggestions on the UPS sizing that I might need or other suggestions?
Assuming a power outage of 3 -5 mintues.... I've previously owned a pellet stove before, Glow King ( a fantastic
stove) , but they're not manufactured any more..... my experience has been that on occasion power might go out
for 1-2 minutes which caused me to have to restart the stove manually.....want to try to avoid that and hopefully
have a battery back up with surge protection for the new stove.... Comments appreciated...

Thanks!

 

[jtp10181]

Is this the current CLassic Bay 1200? Or did you get a used stove?
(broken link removed to http://www.quadrafire.com/products/stoves/pelletStoveDetail.asp?f=CB1200)

It has an automatic ignition so it would restart by itself. If the fire is still going hot when the power is restored, the module would recognize the call for heat and the thermocouple would tell the module the fire is going and it would just start auging pellets again. The problem you might get is that if you have a short vent run when the combustion blower goes out you will get tons of smoke back into the house. I would call quadrafire and ask them what kind of power consumtion it uses. If you don't get anywhere with that I could try giving them a call, I know some people there.

 

[GVA]

Find your combustion blower, auger motor and distribution blower ratings add them together add another amp and go with what matches up.
A. Your talking about short power outages.
B. If your stove is running you won't need the Ignitor kicking on which is the main power draw for the stoves.

 

[keyman512us]

To point you in the right direction when it comes to UPS systems, a good starting point:
http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=BR1500

1500VA is "a good range" for what you are looking to do. I would lean towards APC, I've had good results in other applications.

 

[jtp10181]

The combustion blower might be hard to find the sticker on if this thing is layed out like the Castile or Santa Fe. The convection blower is probably the standard squirrel cage fan which is 1.5A I think. The auger motor will be easy to find the sticker for.

 

[begreen]

I ran these numbers a while back. The 1200i uses ~2 amps/hr. for running the exhaust and convection blowers, the auger is negligible. Allow 5.38 amps at startup. The maximum wattage is only for a short time when the igniter engages.

Surge/low voltage protection is a great idea. The control box is expensive to replace. A UPS will provide this protection. If you got a 500va UPS, you would be well covered for short power outages.

 

[mkmh]

I'm also shopping for a UPS for my St Croix Hastings. We had a few (late night) outages last year and the winter before which resulted in smoke pouring back into the house, smoke detectors going off etc etc. Our installer didn't really give us a bunch of options for installation nor did he share the pros and cons of each configuration. So we wound up with the straight pipe through the wall with no rise....which is not great when you lose power.
In any event, i'm leaning toward a really basic UPS like this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16842117005
1000 VA...no frills, no software, just the basics. I would agree that APC is probably the top name in UPS, but if your just looking for something to cover you for 5-15 minute outages, this one for 75 bucks shipped seems to be a good value.

At some point I may look into modifying the UPS to work with a mrine battery...thus covering you for several hours in an outage, but this can be a pretty time consuming and dangerous thing...so probably not this year.

 

[stoveguy2esw]

I'm also shopping for a UPS for my St Croix Hastings. We had a few (late night) outages last year and the winter before which resulted in smoke pouring back into the house, smoke detectors going off etc etc. Our installer didn't really give us a bunch of options for installation nor did he share the pros and cons of each configuration. So we wound up with the straight pipe through the wall with no rise....which is not great when you lose power.
In any event, i'm leaning toward a really basic UPS like this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16842117005
1000 VA...no frills, no software, just the basics. I would agree that APC is probably the top name in UPS, but if your just looking for something to cover you for 5-15 minute outages, this one for 75 bucks shipped seems to be a good value.

At some point I may look into modifying the UPS to work with a mrine battery...thus covering you for several hours in an outage, but this can be a pretty time consuming and dangerous thing...so probably not this year.

you had smoke???????? whats your setup look like? you shouldnt have had smoke "pouring back into the house" let me know what you have as far as setup maybe i can help you on that


EDIT ok i went back and read whole post , you need a vertical rise to generate a little upward movement , at least 3 ft , or 2 ft rise for every 1 ft vertical, by the way , there is a company in vermont that makes a pretty good batery backup system , "stove sentry" google , or go to www.stovesentry.com i think its their site. i have played with their 503A model and it worked well with my englander when i simulated power outages. didnt have a real one while i had it hooked up, ended up taking it back to the plant as it was just a "for the heck of it" test on my part.

 

[BrotherBart]

..at least 3 ft , or 2 ft rise for every 1 ft vertical, by the way...

Say again stoveguy2ESW. Your last transmission was garbled.

(Pass that Crown over here son.)

 

[mkmh]

I'm also shopping for a UPS for my St Croix Hastings. We had a few (late night) outages last year and the winter before which resulted in smoke pouring back into the house, smoke detectors going off etc etc. Our installer didn't really give us a bunch of options for installation nor did he share the pros and cons of each configuration. So we wound up with the straight pipe through the wall with no rise....which is not great when you lose power.
In any event, i'm leaning toward a really basic UPS like this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16842117005
1000 VA...no frills, no software, just the basics. I would agree that APC is probably the top name in UPS, but if your just looking for something to cover you for 5-15 minute outages, this one for 75 bucks shipped seems to be a good value.

At some point I may look into modifying the UPS to work with a mrine battery...thus covering you for several hours in an outage, but this can be a pretty time consuming and dangerous thing...so probably not this year.

you had smoke???????? whats your setup look like? you shouldnt have had smoke "pouring back into the house" let me know what you have as far as setup maybe i can help you on that


EDIT ok i went back and read whole post , you need a vertical rise to generate a little upward movement , at least 3 ft , or 2 ft rise for every 1 ft vertical, by the way , there is a company in vermont that makes a pretty good batery backup system , "stove sentry" google , or go to www.stovesentry.com i think its their site. i have played with their 503A model and it worked well with my englander when i simulated power outages. didnt have a real one while i had it hooked up, ended up taking it back to the plant as it was just a "for the heck of it" test on my part.

Yep, I hear you. I have zero rise on teh piping and should have anticipated problems...but I was pretty ignorant in this space 2 years ago. I mentioned the idea of adding a rise (outside) to my wife and she hated the idea (looks ugly, right). If nothing else, a UPS with 10-15 minute back-up time will give me enough time to get up and shut the stove down properly in the event of an extended black out.
The stove sentry system looks great, but it costs more than what i'm willing to spend. From what I can see, the only real difference between the Stove Sentry units and a 75.00 UPS is battery size, which means back up time. This is what I was talking about doing as far as my own stove sentry system.
http://www.butkus.org/ups/ups.htm
Though it is not an ultra-complex design.....definitely not recommended for the faint of heart. If I go through with it, i'll bring in a trusted electrician to "sign off" on it

 

[stoveguy2esw]

..at least 3 ft , or 2 ft rise for every 1 ft vertical, by the way...

Say again stoveguy2ESW. Your last transmission was garbled.

(Pass that Crown over here son.)

lol thought horizontal , typed vertical , 1 shot o crown =/ for BB

 

[stoveguy2esw]

hey MK , looks sound to me , probably cheaper and would have more "staying power" i just floated the stovesentry thing out there because i knew of it and it worked well for me when i tested it. but by all means go with this thing if you can assemble it and make it work for you (you should be able to) good deal! and do somthing with that flue pipe as well, just in case, you could build a "mini chase" around it , clearance to pellet vent is only a few inches (3 for simpson, im sure others are comparable) nothing like redundancy. if you go with the setup you posted the link for i'd love to hear how it does!

 

[DougF]

Thanks to all for the info.... found out that the Quadrafire 1200 takes 4.1 Amps at startup and 1.1 Amps running..... so it would appear that a 650VA UPS would work for intermittent power glitches.... So for now looks like I'll go with a 1000/1500VA UPS as suggested....

From what I read the important value is the Amp Hours on the battery for running longer periods of time "off the grid" but that seems to be an illusive spec on the UPS sites I've been looking at. Is it correct in assuming ,by example, that if I had a device running at 2 Amps that a UPS with a battery rated at 4 Amp Hours would run for 2 hours?