Smoke in the room from the convection vents.

Night before last we got up in the weeee hours to use the facilities...Smelled something not quit right.

Headed out to the living room and the Small Whitfield is making bad smells....Vent pipe is very hot....Top casting on the stove under the trivet is scorching hot....

Stove set on low.....?????

I had set the stove on the number 2 setting to give just a tad more heat.

We have always run the stove on #1....This stove is our "Shoulder season unit" AND it picks up the slack when the big Whitfield can't keep up during colder weather.

I had cleaned the stove recently so I knew the vent was not dirty enough to catch fire...

The area above the heat tubes is pretty much unreachable without taking the stove apart (Big job)
I can get a long bottle brush in there...But limited help

The tube scraper keeps the heat tubes clean...But the area above the tubes (About 2" ) can get skunked up pretty good.

That area caught fire and really went to town......

We shut the stove off and let it cool off...Rekindled the fire and all seemed fine.....Except I could smell a slight smoke odor ....

After breakfast I did the LBT and checked things.....Again...seemed fine...../All day yesterday I could smell a slight smoke smell..

Shut the stove off....More checks....Seems fine......

Restart....No smell until the stove got HOT...Then a light smoke smell from the heat tubes.....


This morning I figured it out..

This stove has a shunt tube from the air plenum to the fire tray..../This adds combustion air to the fire...

Originally the heat setting changed the convection fan speed as well as the fuel feed on/off timing.

On low the Auger feeds every 10 second for 3 seconds and the fan is at 60 volts///Relatively low speed.

Over the last 10 years the slow air speed had allowed fuel dust (Shell dust) and room air dust to accumulate in the heat tubes.....When the abundant crap above the heat tubes went poof...The tubes got really hot.....Hence the smoke smell....

We shut the stove off late as the house was 75F.....This morning I fired the stove and ran it on #1.....No smell....

Ramped up the fuel and the smell came back.....Took about 20 minutes on low for the smell to die off....

An Accumulation of the dust was the culprit.

The convection fan is in the base of the stove and the air inlet is in the mechanical cabinet.....Shell/pellet dust does get in there...The fan picks it up and stuffs it into the tubes WHERE ON A HIGH HEAT.....the stuff actually smolders and gives off smoke......

Took a while to figure this one out....


THE FIX....ASAP...I will get an air line in the house from the compressor......Open up the door on stove base and blow out the fan squirrel cage and blow the crap out of the stove....A damp towel over the front of the heat tube area to catch the dust.....120 psi air will dislodge that junk and stop the bad smell.....

Almost any pellet stove can do this given the right circumstances .....The fines from the fuel do find there way into the cabinet and the convection fan picks it up and it's just a matter of time.....

All good now.....

 

Wow! Nice catch! That definitely took some investigating.

 

The nose knows.

 

Drove me nuts for quite a while.....After shutting things off and later doing a relight on a cold stove I made the fire smoke a lot....Not smell in the room or from the vents....

As soon as the stove was hot the stove would give off smoke smell......I ran it on low and the smell went away.....

Yeah...it was a real PITA to sort out..