Are the newer style gasification boilers less troublesome?

Same principles of operation though.

 

Thanks for all the information everyone. I’m going to pull the fan tomorrow & see what I find. Also going to let my dealer know what’s going on in case it is a warranty issue.

 

So I just got ready to go to bed & my wife closed the shade in our bedroom window & said” honey the red light is flashing on the wood stove “ so I went over & sure enough the fan breaker was tripped. So I figured I may as well take the blower motor off & see what I find.

 

Another shot

 

Any ideas on the best way to remove this crud? Wire brush?

 

That would be my first choice I think...that and a putty knife, or some sort of scraper.
Might could carefully apply some heat to it to get things dried out and easier to remove...creosote will kinda puff up when heated up...easier to remove then. Looks like maybe it just needs cleaned up all around the edge there...where the impellor is almost touching the fan housing...or is the buildup hitting somewhere inside the housing when mounted up in normal operation?

 

I got the impeller off. And scraped all around the motor side in the back of the impeller. It’s all pretty crudded up but it’s dry creosote. A lot is coming off the brush I just sprayed some WD-40 on the spot to see if that loosens it.

 

I'm surprised that it's that crudded up...my understanding is that things usually dry out/clean up when it gets cold (like its been the last day or so) out and the boiler gets a chance to stretch its legs a lil...

 

Got it back together & it’s running. We’ll see what we have in the morning.

 

Somewhat cleaner:

 

I've had that happen to me before with the fan, what sucks about mine is that it has glass fuses instead of circuit breakers

Its usually after a bit of a warm spell, and the boiler ends up idling more
Nice thing is that it comes out easy

I've used a hacksaw blade to clean between the impeller and the housing

 

Thanks for the tip!

 

Just finished chores & checked the fire. Everything working as it should. Guess I’ll try splitting the wood I have into smaller splits. I can’t think of. Morningwood mentioned leaving the bypass open to long possibly being any issue. I could be guilty of that as well. We shall see. Thanks for all the help fellas.

 

Looks like the impeller most likely got stuck by the looks of that build up. I get some buildup of dry powdery ash on mine that I clean off once a year.

Only had the creosote problem once during some mild weather when I was burning wood that wasn't nearly dry enough.

 

This was / is a problem on the older G series. On the boilers we have you can only have the bypass lever for a maximum of 5 minutes and then the fan kicks off. I took my fan off a month or so ago, it had a layer of fine ash on it. The HM gurus recommend cleaning it at least once a winter and at the end of the year. My plan is clean mine as often as I can since it's not a very hard job.

I took the plate off of the back and vacuumed out above the turbulators too. That was probably a waste of time but I figured I'd do it while I had the tools out there.

 

Thanks for the information. It is much appreciated. I still have a lot to learn.

 

I was surprised that the material on the impellers was enough to keep the fan from turning.

 

That's one thing that I really liked about the Polar over the HM. The Polar has a really nice ECM fan ( high dollar too ) on it. The Polar was also 3k or 4k more when I looked it too.

Maybe keep an eye on your runtime ( it's on the PLC ) and make sure you clean the fan every X hundred hours. Mine had roughly 400 - 500 hours on it when I cleaned it. I'm close to 700 now.