Pellet heads!! What's up today?

The rental is downstairs....1000 sq ft
We put a triple wide manufactured home on a full daylight basement.
The front section is the apartment and one end and the rear is storage and my machine shop
They currently have 3500 sq ft home. Big step down to 2300 ft
They are going to sell it and make a bundle
Us old critters don't need 2300 sq ft any more

The appt has a bedroom, bath, laundry room, living room and a little tiny kitchen.
And one pellet stove.....
Very cozy little place

 

With the wind howling and low temps we've had all week, I've been running the boiler a couple times a day to keep the FHW pipes in the garage from freezing. When the garage got to 32* yesterday morning, I blocked the staircase off from the cats, opened the door between the garage and the basement and upped the P61a's thermostat (which is about 10' from the door) by a couple of degrees and let her rip.

Did that for about an hour or a little more and then closed the door. Garage air temp was in the mid 40's (of course there are 3.5 tons of pellets in there that are colder). By late afternoon, despite the sun and winds dying back to 10-20 mph, the temp had crept down to 35* in there. With more single digit night-time temps coming (minus the brutal winds we've had), I did the another round of warming the garage last night before going to bed.

This morning (2:30 am), the garage had worked its way down to 35*, so I'm doing the same thing right now. Warmer temps are on the way in a couple of days, so this won't go on much longer.

May put a small heater in the garage before next heating season. Not sure if I want gas (my propane tanks are small and I won't put in larger), or just put an electric heater out there. Propane is insanely expensive for me, and I have credits from my solar, so probably electric makes more sense.

I remember thinking of doing that before, but we haven't had the prolonged low temps and high winds for the last couple of years. And, this winter isn't even as cold as we've had in the last 15 years - at least two winters we had weeks where night temps were in the negative teens (lowest was -21*) and highs at 0*F or single positive digits.

 

A friend of mine here got solar after I did, and put more panels on than he really needed, but he had the same plan in mind.....he runs small electric units in colder rooms. Working out well for him so far.

 

Still waiting for the Wiseway stove....It is in transit from Chattanooga TN and got delayed....Likely a weather related issue.

This morning it is moving again....Was supposed to be here Monday 17th.

Ah well.....So here in a few hours my Son in law and I will head out to drag home the Big Whitfield Adv 2T.
Weather is supposed to be nice today.....Be great to get the stove home and inside without getting it soaking wet......

 

We headed over to Sandy, Oregon to pick up the Advantage 2T stove.
We get there about 12:30 and the guy has the garage door up and all ready....
After a few minutes of Glad handing and chat we take a peek at the stove.
Absolutely great shape.
(Except the Control board is TOAST....Board is melted.....)

The chassis is sweet.....Paint is very nice......

All the trim is nice......Glass is perfect....Door seal says a couple possibilities....Either it has been replaced or the stove has little use.....Fire brick says it has been used a fair amount....But this is a lovely specimen...

So we negotiate a bit on price and the little prize heads onto the trailer for $125.....Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

All loaded up and we are heading home....

I get a text message on the way home.....Home Depot says out Wiseway stove is available for pickup.

Perfect.....Right on our way at the Sherwood, Oregon store.....Not even out of the way.....Just swing into the store and load up the stove..

So both our prizes are home and snuggled up in the basement .....
So.....First order of bizz is to get the Wiseway into the family room.
Looks like we will load it in the bucket of the skid steer and get it on the front deck.....Still in the crate and then wrestle it inside.

The stove needs some assembly .....One large box....Probably the base.....And a smaller box of goodies.

The cardboard over the crate was in shambles.....The crate was decent.....Plastic bag over the stove looks good.

I want to get the stove inside before we tear the crate off .....If there are issues we can get pics as we peel off the crate...

What I can see says things are fine.

The Whit is going to sit until Spring and I can get it outside and tear it apart......

I suspect the usual neglect as far as cleaning of ash and such is the case.....Very likely the draft fan has not seen any oil in the bearings either.......

Going to be a fun little project.

 

A Coenwalh is a Bishop so one of my 40th great grandpas was Bishop of Mercia

 

Oooh, now you have lots of toys to play with and keep you busy.

 

B
Yeah....sure enough.

Son in law is coming back up on Tues afternoon and we will wrangle the Wiseway into the family room.
I can haul it up and around to the front deck in the Skid Steer loader and sit it on the deck ....We can muscle it through the slider door and right close to where it will be located.

Some assembly required.....The base has to be bolted on and a few other little things messed with....
The original Wiseway had a fabricated base that was a welded tube frame....The new ones have a formed sheet metal base that bolts on.....This was done to allow a thinner packaging.......
When these were made here on the west coast years ago they were a bit different.....

When Gary Wisener sold the rights to US STOVE and they cleaned up the design some.....
The Whitfield project will be an exact repeat of our other Advantage 2T
Here in a while I will start gathering all the components for the control box build....

Refurbishing the stove will be a walk in the park

New fans, Auger motor and fire brick....A complete cleaning...

The paint is near perfect....no sense in messing with that.....

When we swap the stoves we will likely replace the vent.....30 years on the old stuff.....New pipe will be a plus and make the install much easier.......

 

J,

Are you doing any power monitoring? I’ve done a similar setup as you did with the solar generator and tie in.

I run some home automation that can be fully local, as in not reliant on public internet or cloud to function.

I picked up a zwave plug that was rated for higher power and put my stove through startup.

 

Yesterday at breakfast time we had what appeared to be a tiny power drop....
The LED clocks all stayed up but the big Whitfield shut down...
I walked over and the main power light was on....So the latchout relay did not open....The main power relay opened and I had to press the start button to restart the stove.....

I shut the stove off and took the time to clean it....Then did a restart.....The restart went fine and the stove ran from 10:45 yesterday morning and is still fine.

We have had outages and the control shuts down and must be reset to do a restart.

This was a really odd situation.....But things worked as they are supposed to....Sort of.....The stove had be restarted......

Ah well....an education for sure....

 

We had a wind event with a bunch of rain last night.
Big stove shut down like it did the other day...
The little stove was not in use....BUT when I flipped the main power switch....NO JOY

Had to do a reset.....The outage was just long enough to kill the stoves, but not the LED clock in the microwave.


We did have power through the night .....And heat..

 

I have considered a UPS
If the power does go out and then come back on I want the security of knowing that the stove can't try to restart without Human intervention.....
Unless we get a large enough UPS that it can power the stove for up to 8 hours it would likely result in the stove shutting down anyway...

 

The son in law came up and we moved the Wiseway into the family room.
Awkward
I cut the crate off the beast....
Tomorrow I will try to get the base bolted on and stand the stove up onto the floor pad.

 

The Eagle has landed .
I grabbed the battery powered Ryobi multi tool (Vibrating cutter) and finished getting the crate off the stove.
With the stove on it's "Face side" we cribbed up the end that bolts to the base and got the base fastened to the stove ...
The bolts that came with the stove were fine...But the flat washers that were supplied were waaaaaaaay too small and barely covered the bolt hole/slot in the base....(One hole and one slot to allow for slight fabrication variations)
Scared up a couple much larger washers

We laid down a rug runner to make sure we did not "mung" the vinyl flooring.

Next came the final lift.......The stove tilted up quite easily onto the floor pad.
Aside from the base not sitting flat....Perfect.

We will need a jack bolt and a little pad under the RH rear corner to keep the stove from rocking corner to corner.
The pad is flat across and corner to corner.....I suspect that the stove base is the culprit.

Tile can be uneven dues to slight variations in the set.....The error I am seeing still points to the stove base....Oh well.....We'll put a jack under the offending corner ....Call it day.

Soooo
The long wait is finally over......A Wiseway stove is officially here....

Once the corner jack is in and the stove is stable will come the tedious task of getting the venting system figured out.
The plan is to use a 4 bolt flange setup on both the connection with the stove and the pipe that passes through the wall thimble....

This will allow the pipe to be easily removed .....Stove will go outside for the initial "Burn in" to get it hotter than the fires of hell and dammation to cure the paint....Then back into the house for the final time.....

And so we proceed