Pellet heads!! What's up today?

-1 here when I got up at 5am. P43 cranking out the heat with the douglas fir pellets. Letting downstairs bathroom faucet trickle so water inlet pipe from well doesn't freeze.

sam

 

It's cold out, school got cancelled today and tomorrow due to cold temps. Tonight is supposed to be the lowest at -8 and -30 with wind chill. Then it starts to slowly warm up a little.

We didn't take any warm vacations this year. Definitely missing a week or two of warmer weather with some humidity.

 

Whatever keeps you the missus and the furry kids warm !!

Im actually missing the added pellet heat from the basement right now.

Boiler needs to be replaced. Current is 30 years old and maybe newer would heat better. Maybe not

 

Going to start construction in the spring. Really been thinking about in floor heat for the house and garage using a propane combi broiler. I haven't found to many negatives, but I don't know much about that type of system.

 

I wouldn't worry about efficiency for your oil burner, I'd just worry about it suddenly deciding to retire. At my previous house, the oil boiler's cast iron tank decided to split after 23 years. Replaced my current house's propane boiler when it was 30+, as I didn't want to take chances and my separate water heater had crapped out so I decided replacing them both with a HE combi-boiler made sense (and saved room in the basement). Bonus was that instead of having part of the chimney worked on because of damage, I had the bad upper layers of blocks removed and capped it.

 

Thanks, it went relatively smoothly and got home about 11:30pm when it was -2*. It was 5* at the airport, and on my 30 mile trip home, the temp went as low as -8* in one area I went thru. It is currently -9* here. Still have another couple of hours for it to fall some more.

Currently the P43 is on constant heat as it was starting back up before it was completely shut down.

 

A helpful note for owners of the Quadrafire 1000 pellet stove

After getting the one we have in the apartment down stairs patched up and back running after the fire pot disintegrated the other day.
I ordered up a replacement fire pot to replace the one I robbed from our Quad 1000 upstairs.
OK
Our upstairs Quad has a draft inducer fan (LH side rear that blows air into the box under the fire pot)
The fan has become very noisy in the past few years.
I figured that since I was working in the beast I would replace the fan.

I grabbed the parts book for the stove and hit the net in search of a new fan.
I came up empty handed real quick except for a couple on Ebay....$399 and another for $599
Absolutely no way I am coughing up that much coin for this stupid little fan.

I searched all the online sellers and some had listing and pictures....MARKED DISCONTINUED ....

OK
There has to be a way to get a fan

It is a FASCO fan...30 CFM @3000 RPM

I did a search and YESSSSSSSSSSSSS....There is a fan from Fasco.....A167 is the model.

One caveat....The OEM fan has a damper plate on the fan inlet side to adjust the fire height and keep the burn clean and in the sweet spot.

The A167 can be used .....But the damper plate will need to be removed from the old fan and fitted to the new one.

Not a big deal....Just a little bit of fooling around.

Also The motor looks identical to the old one.....A good possibility that the motor will swap right onto the OEM fan housing.

Swap the motor....Clean up the original Squirrel cage and install it onto the shaft.....GOOD TO GO.

I will not know until the new fan gets here if I can simply swap the motor......

I WILL UPDATE THIS THREAD ONCE THE NEW FAN ARRIVES......

But even if the motor can't be swapped.....The fan as a unit can bolt right on after adding the damper plate.....

See ya soon on this one....

 

View attachment 44178

 

We ran "Munchy" this morning and crushed a couple barrels of shells..
Cleaned the little stove and got it back on line a bit ago.....

Waiting for the parts for the Quad 1000 .
Decided to tear into the beast and pull some maintenance that is long overdue....
Removed the combustion booster fan and worked on it.
It has gotten noisy over the past couple years .....30 years old now....So it deserves some hands on TLC....

A few more cool dry days on tap....
Running four 5 gallon buckets of shells per day.....Last night we ran only the big stove through until 3 am and I lit the little stove back up then.
House was still 69 F so a decent evening....
I will be very happy when we can get into weather where we can run only one stove.....

 

I was away from home for 5 days attending to family business. My pet sitter, who is probably a whole 5' tall and 90 pounds, is wonderful in taking care of feeding the pets and the pellets stoves. This time, my mini split would take care of heating until Monday evening, when the temps were supposed to drop drastically. And I told her that once she turned off the minisplit, to top off the hopper each visit (she comes by twice per day)

I cleaned both pellet stoves well before I left to make sure there weren't any issues. Of course, I can't control for human error.

I saw this when I got home very late Tuesday night.



Well, that isn't cool. I was burning some softies, which I had been burning for a week or more previous to when I left, and it would take days to deposit a thin layer of light brown ash. That deposit was totally black and unusual. I noted to myself that I would need to clean the glass as soon as I could shut down the stove, which wasn't happening at negative numbers. The pet sitter had left a partial bag of pellets on the step stool, so I went to look at if there was room in the hopper to add them.

The hopper door is very tight on the P43 (I don't know if don2222 remembers it) - unlike the P61a, it does not have a latch, it is entirely compression fit. Except, this time it wasn't. It was just resting in the down position. Well, I was 99% certain my questions had been solved with that one little discovery.

A couple days later I cleaned the glass, and haven't had the black, thick soot/ash show back up. I did point out the issue with the pet sitter, for her awareness. I'm sure after topping up the hopper, she let the lid drop, stepped off the stool and put the partial bag of pellets down - forgetting to finish by pressing firmly down on the lid for a tight seal.

 

Figures that with this winter being much colder than past years lately, I hurt my back. Not sure how, strained it a few months ago but had no issues bringing in pellets. Could be from having to limit how much effort with the left arm I had to limit after the pacemaker surgery, but started to get sciatica pain and some leg pain on the left side a couple weeks ago. Going in to see the physiatry docs on Thurs (earliest appointment I could get) to see if it's a muscle issue (don't think so) or a disc/spine issue (symptoms lean towards that).

Had a 5th lumbar discectomy 20 years ago from a badly ruptured disc and resulting nerve damage from the spinal cord being rubbed by the disc and then scar tissue. Getting a lot of the same symptoms but hoping it's not as bad this time. 20 years ago my insurance wouldn't authorize an MRI until after physical therapy. The PT actually caused more damage to the point when my doc did the reflex test when he hit my right knee my leg reacted but in slow motion. MRI got authorized then.

I've been doing some lower back exercises, heating pad plus wearing a back brace and a sciatica brace (goes around hips, puts pressure on upper butt, does help to lower the pain). Can handle bringing in and stacking 5-6 bags of pellets before pain level goes up so I do that every few days.

Lori justs says "guess it's your year now to have medical problems"

sam