St. Croix Revolution - Programs, BTUs and Pellets per hour

[slangtruth]

I have a St. Croix Revolution furnace, just starting it up again for the year (we didn't actually use it last year at all - life was in the way and dino fuel was pretty cheap, at least at the beginning of the season). I downloaded the recent manual and saw the chart attached below, which I've never seen before. It is set up for Program 4, which gives the highest BTU output for pellets. The burn rate per hour is what I would expect from the nominal ratings for the fuel and my experience -- we've basically had to have it cranking at 100% any time we've used it, because due to an inefficient installation most of the heat was never making our living space. I'm having an HVAC guy attack that problem this week and am hoping to dramatically increase the efficiency. Once that's done I will be able to test to find the sweet spot for the heat we need versus the amount of fuel we burn, but in the meantime I'm wondering if anyone has seen or just knows how this chart would look for Programs 2 or 3? Is it simply a matter of working out the ratio of auger cycle times (5.5 seconds per cycle for Program 4, 6.5 seconds per cycle for Program 3) and applying that ratio to the fuel consumption figures to get a ballpark idea?

When these furnaces were first introduced a couple of years back several people here said they were able to heat decently sized living spaces to the upper 60s degree range at Program 3, some at Program 2. Due to my lousy installation, I'm losing so much heat in the ductwork that anything less than full cranked up Program 4/Heat Level 5 is essentially useless - I'm hoping that will be corrected soon and I can drop my per hour consumption. Right now, at 4/5 I go through about 4 bags a day if I keep it on all day, and that's just good enough to keep the house in the low 60s (61-63). If there are still Revolution owners here who've been going for a couple of years now, what ettings have you settled on and how much fuel a year are you going through?

Thanks.

 

[hossthehermit]

My house is warm I run program 1, level 4 on the t-stat right now, when it gets cold I run program 2, level 4, still on t-stat. burned 5 ton each of the last 2 years, 4 ton the year before, then ran out. Don't know about your data table, I just know what works for me. Where at in the Northeast are you?

 

[Freddels]

I just installed the SCF-050 and was wondering what my pellet usage is going to be this year. In the past years, I was running just my Harmon to warm an unheated 3-season porch. This year I'm trying to heat the whole house. So far, the house (raised ranch/split-level) has been pretty warm and I haven't hooked it up into my duct work yet. I had to turn it off today b/c it was too warm.

It's not as technologically advanced as the Revolution though.

 

[slangtruth]

Hoss-

I'm in Western Mass. Can't really say what the furnace can do yet since the installation is so wonky, but I've got roughly 1500 sq ft on the first floor with 12 ft ceilings, and the second floor has a cathedral ceiling that hits over 20 ft. We shut the second floor off at night and don't care if heat just kind of dribbles up from below during the day, but I'd like be able to reliably go to 65-70 downstairs even when it gets cold at some setting. Right now we have almost no air pressure at the registers and at least a room's worth of heat is being lost in the huge, leaky ducts which were installed for the oil heat back when oil was a quarter a gallon. Besides which the original installer didn't put in backdraft dampers so when we were making heat it would just short circuit through the oil rig back to the return (temporarily stopped by cardboard over the oil plant's air filters, but to be addressed this week). The idea is to tighten that up and keep all the heat the Rev develops on the first floor and as close to the registers as possible. I can live with 4-5 tons of pellets a year if I can stay at 65 for most of that time.

 

[Freddels]

Besides, sealing up the joints in the duct work, you might want to see about installing some duct fans to get the airflow.

 

[slangtruth]

Update - the HVAC guys came in and did a proper rejiggering of the duct system. They installed a heavy-duty backdraft damper to keep the pellet heat out of the oil rig, and while maintaining oil heat compatibility rerouted the ductwork to put all the output of the Revolution into a total of six registers spread around the first floor (which is our living space). Before this, I would need to run at Program 4/Level 5 to even get the first floor up to 60-62 degrees (with the entire second floor shut off for both supply and return, and the doors connecting the floors closed). Now, with the outside temp at 40 and dropping, it's happily cruising along keeping the first floor at 65-66 on Program 1/Level 3. With luck, that will leave me some wiggle room for when it gets really cold out. At last, I'm getting what I paid for! The takeaway should be that if you decide to go the pellet furnace route, be sure you talk to a real HVAC guy, even just for a quick consult. I can't kick at the guys who sold me the stove that hard (not for this, anyway, although there were other issues...) - they were traditional pellet stove dealers, and the complexity of properly attaching to the ductwork and planning the installation was outside of their experience, especially since I got the first Revolution they ever installed.

 

[hossthehermit]

Glad you're getting a handle on it. Definitely a learning curve with these.