Power-Outage?? What Will Happen!!

[Plowboy]

Been running our new Accentra pellet stove and it's doing a good job.
It's cool today with rain and possible lighting in the forecast. My question is if we are out and the electricity goes out with the stove running, that will shut down the stove, will that create lots of smoke in the firebox with no flu motor running? Will the house fill up with smoke? This could happen during a snow storm also.
Just wondering if there will be a smoke problem if the power is out when the stove is going.

Bill

 

[rap69ri]

Bill,

As long as you've followed the manufacturer's guidelines for exhaust venting the smoke should continue to go out the piping even with power out. That being said, you may want to invest in a battery backup for the stove for power outages and to protect your control board from power spikes. You can usually pick one up at your local office supply store for $40 - $70, and it can really save you some aggrevation further on down the line.

 

[petejung]

From personal experience, our power went out and aside from the fact that the fire was out, I couldn't even tell what had happened. The house was not filled with smoke. I am certainly glad that I followed the manufacturers instructions and put in neough vertical rise to induce natural draft, or I would have had a problem.

 

[erhalt1]

How long will the power supply last

 

[webbie]

Even a decent sized computer UPS system will run the pellet stove long enough so that you can shut it down and have it evacuate all the smoke.

You can calc how long this is by figuring the power drain of your pellet stove (add the motors together and a little more for the control board), and then look at the UPS rating.

A UPS that costs less than $200 would probably run most pellet stoves from 10-15 minutes. That takes care of momentary power outages and shut down for longer ones, but it will not operate the stove for long periods.

For longer backups, use something like this:
http://www.stovesentry.com/

Or see if your stove model has a spec for some other sort of backup.

 

[mkmh]

Been running our new Accentra pellet stove and it's doing a good job.
It's cool today with rain and possible lighting in the forecast. My question is if we are out and the electricity goes out with the stove running, that will shut down the stove, will that create lots of smoke in the firebox with no flu motor running? Will the house fill up with smoke? This could happen during a snow storm also.
Just wondering if there will be a smoke problem if the power is out when the stove is going.

Bill

Our St Croix stove is installed direct vent, no vertical rise. When the power goes out we do get smoke that rolls back into the house. Not enough to be dangerous, but plenty enough to be a nuisance. I bought a UPS at the beginning of the season, but didn't go quite big enough to even power the fans. "By the book" it should have given me at least 5 minutes, but it doesn't.
Next season i'll be either adding the vertical rise or buying a much lasrger UPS (maybe both)

 

[petejung]

Being in the IT business, I've found that the run time's stated on the UPS literature is usually WAY off. I have a couple of monster UPS's at the office that provide line quality and power backup to all of our routers/servers, with battery stacks that purport to provide each unit with 135 minutes of run time each. I think with new batteries, I can get maybe 30-35 minutes (I killed the live production battery time test when it reported only 5 minutes of run time left, to avoid shutting down my entire company and thus begin my employment search). As the batteries age, the actual run time goes lower.

So everyone with a UPS out there, if you're counting on it to run your stove for any length of time, oversize your UPS and replace your batteries every 2-3 years.