New control box for the Whitfield

Some of this stuff is pretty mundane though.

A friend recently asked me, "Wouldn't it just be easier to turn up the thermostat" ?????

I laughed looooong and loud at his comment

This house is real close to 2400 sqft and spread out (Ranch style) and is equipped with electric heat.
(Did that because it satisfied building code and gave us an air handler for the AC)

Running the electric would spin the KW meter to the tune of about $1000 a month to heat this barn.

We planed from the gitgo to use pellet stoves and nut shells.

With the cost of shells to heat the entire season at less than $100 the electric heat is locked in the off position.

Never been turned on since new.

Maybe it's not so mundane afterall

As long as others find these things at least amusing it's a good thing.


We had a client in yesterday that is an electrician and does light industrial maintenance, and I showed him the new controller and some of the components.

He commented that so much of even the industrial controls are all a one time shot and then toss it.

He mentioned some motor control units ???????? and that they are good (if you're lucky) for a couple years and then they need replacing to the tune of several $grand.

Sad state of affairs.

Seems that everything has become "Throwaway"

Haaaaaaaaaaaaa, a pellet stove that comes pre-charged for the winter, and when it's empty you toss it and get a new one.


The entire world has become a throw away item pretty much.

This can be seen to a great degree with the Smart phone scene. Folks standing in line to get the latest unit from Apple or ?????? just so they can bee cool and have the latest gizmo.

I howled in protest when I had to trade in my iphone 4 and only did so because none of my banking and other important apps would work.

Ahhhh well, such is life.


Maybe an app to control the pellet stove from the smart phone, no need to even get out of ones chair.

 

Now to train the cat to load the pellets?
Mine refuse to do anything other than eat and sleep, (and anoy us about feeding them).

 

That's a cat thing.

Mine will let me know if she is cold, and I need to build a fire in another stove.

She will chirp and go look in the window of the cold stove and look at me and chirp again.

If the house is too cold at night she wiggles under the covers and snuggles up close.

Little heat suckers.

 

Not much to add troops.
Just waiting now for parts.

Gotta get the main cycle timer and other relays.

Doing these as small orders takes far longer than if it was a big order.

I had the sales staff run them in as "Fill in orders" that are not a RUSH

Will take a few weeks to get them.

I am in no hurry.

I ordered spares too, so will be set once they get here.

These are spec'd out specifically for each application and not just pulled off the shelf like an oil filter at the parts store.

Custom made to order.

Keep ya informed as things happen

 

Decided to tear the parts all out of the panel and get the box cleaned up and going to try buffing it rather than painting it (Will just dull, rather than chip and peel.

Started removing the components and the little plastic nuts on the fuse holders all broke in half or worse.

These fuse holders are not the cheap Chinese crap either, but rather pricey units from Bussmann.

OOOOOK

Went online to the Bussmann web site and snooped about, and sure enough I find the page that lists all the various fuse holder styles.

At the bottom of the page is a "parts list" with METAL nuts to replace the plastic ones.

Cooooool.

Well almost.

I called Bussmann and they don't have any in stock and it a 6 WEEK lead time.

I cruise the web further and find a distributor that has some in stock.

I wanted 12 just to be sure I have spares.

THIS AMOUNT DOES NOT QUALIFY FOR THEIR MINIMUM ORDER.

Soooooo, back to square one.

Tried Fry's and a few other places, nooooooooooooooooooo luck

Finally got tired of looking for them by application and got out the tools.

Vernier calipers and a thread gauge.

Ooooooook

.499" and 32 threads per inch.

Sweeeeeet, it's a standard 1/2" - 32 nut.

Off to ebay we go.

A very few mouse clicks and I scored a bag of 100 nuts fot $11

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

So in a few days the nuts will be here and we can rock and roll again.

The little plastic nuts were just too thin and broke, and I barely snugged them up with a tool made for such purposes.

Arrrrrrgh

 

UPDATE

A little package with 100 1/2" 32 thrd nuts showed up today for the fuse holders.

These really work well, snug up nice and look good too.

I completely disassembled the panel and cleaned it well with an SOS pad and hot water, then decided that further fussing about a fancy finish was really not worth the extra time and trouble.

This is a working piece of equipment and making it all real super spiffy was pretty much a moot point.

Within a few weeks of operating the thing is going to show wear and tear.

Decided to leave the panel natural aluminum color and off to the rodeo we go.

Reinstalled all the lights, switches and controls and will not start in on getting it ready to wire up.

Still need some of the relays before I can do the actual locating in the panel.

At least it is moving ahead some.

Get paid on the first, so will see about ordering some relays.

All for now

 

UPDATE---UPDATE
Been in a holding and engineering pattern for a while, but have started moving ahead again.
The relays/timers are ordered now and yesterday I scared up a huge pile of resistors to use in the fabrication of the time relay control (Heat selector)
Ebay as usual turned out to be a great source of components.

Instead of a common 3, 4 or 5 position rotary control I decided to go on the wild side and install a single pole 12 position rotary switch.

The factory low setting was 7 seconds off time and then the settings went
5 seconds, 3 seconds, 2 seconds and 1.5 seconds


With the shells, the only real long term usable setting is the low (7 second) setting with the 5 second setting being fine for startup to get the stove hot and get the low temp snap switch locked in before the timer runs out.

The new control allows full independent draft fan speed control all the way, so it seemed like a no brainer to have a nearly linear feed setting that gives a good selection of feed rates for running shells, but also duplicates closely the original factory choices as well, which will allow running pellets as well.

Having a fine adjustment in the lower settings (long off time) would be a real plus to get the burn right in the sweet spot and allow for variations in the shells that we see.
Some batches will have more nut meats (pieces) which is more oily and MORE heat.

Being able to tweak things will be just great.

Decided to use the following resistor values.

**These are 1000 ohm values**
The numbers will actually be pretty much the time value as well.

768k
732k
715k
698k
634k
590k
536k
499k
402k
301k
200k
100k

So 7.68 seconds, 7.32 seconds and so on.

The 698 and 715 will be a very close duplicate of whats there now, with the 536 and 634 giving a good long term High heat setting.

The remainder of the settings can be used down into the 402, 301, 200 and such for pellets with the 100 being basically a PRIME setting to get the auger full if run dry.

This may seems a bit over the top, but running alternative fuels does present some challenges that the factory settings just did not address.

Anyway.

Things are progressing.

Will get more pix and info as it happens.

 

Dug out the Precision brand one shot timer and did some time testing under load this morning.

The very lowest setting is marked .3 minutes (18 seconds) but only stayed on for 10 seconds.
The 5 minute setting was close at 4:35
The 10 minute setting ran about 11 minutes.

These adjustments are not an absolute "Micrometer" adjust, but plenty good for the start up timer.
15 minutes should be fine to heat the stove up to the point that the low temp snap closes

 

UPDATE UPDATE

More goodies showed up today for the new controller.

Resistors, Potentiometers, a couple 12 pin mil spec type Heavy duty plugs to connect the controller to the stove and a few tid bits.

Still waiting on the timers/relays though.

The large mil type plugs are off ebay and came from China, but look very nice.

Rated at 250 volts ac @ 25 amps (Way more than needed)
Lovely heavy duty plug set.

 

Slowly the goodies are showing up for the new panel.

8 packs of resistors of the 12 ordered have arrived. (Far cheaper to order a package of 100 resistors of each size from one online seller rather than driving all over town looking and likely not getting whats needed)

$5 for a bag of 100 is cheap.

A couple potentiometers showed up as did some 12 position rotary switches and a couple 12 pin circular connectors.

The "Amphenol STYLE" connectors will facilitate easy connection of the controller to the stove chassis.

Sadly the connectors came with six 1.5mm pins and six 2.5mm pins all spaced out in groups of 3 pins.

I disassembled the two plugs (male and female) and swapped all the 2.5mm pins into one assembly.

The 1.5 mm pins were just a tad small, and I preferred the 2.5 for amperage carrying ability.

I sent an email to the company to see about more of the 2.5 mm pins.


Still waiting on the relays.

Everything ordered has been done in multiples so as to have spare parts of the same type should they be needed in the future.

 

Noticed this morning that the company I ordered the Infitec relays and timers from had billed my debit card, so this means that the parts have been completed and will soon be here.

Just in time for summer weather and the interest in stoves to fall off

Actually this will give me a great opportunity to finish the panel and then connect it to my spare Adv 2 T and test it real time.

 

More changes in the design.

Been thinking about the heat control selector and had been of the mindset to use a multiple position rotary switch with individual resistors for each setting.

This entails a lot of fiddling with building a resistor array on a circuit board and then wiring this through the rotary switch to the timer.

This plan adds a lot of extra wiring in the panel plus the resistor array board takes up space too.

Decided to use a top notch 1 M ohm potentiometer (pot) and put a little friction lock on the knob so it can't get bumped easily.

Then the idea of "HOW" to easily tell where the setting is came up ???????????

Well the pot is a 1 m ohm and the common settings will be in the 750k ohm to 500k ohm range

Hmmmmmm

A PANEL MOUNTED OHM METER that can read 0 to 2 meg ohms sounded like a sweet solution.

Found some online and ordered 2 (one for spare)

This will allow the heat setting to be readily displayed on the panel in a cool little blue led readout

The meter is small and will fit handily in the space between the LED green/red lamps and the fuses

No sense in wasting that panel space

Just need to finish the design on the friction lock for the pot control knob.
These pots move easily and an inadvertent nudge could end up moving the heat setting to either a fire out or OMG the stove is going to melt any second now

Ahhhh yesss.

Gonna be great.

 

GREAT NEWS

The relays/timer showed up a bit ago.
The piccy with the 3 units sitting side by side are as follows.

Left one is the actual on off timer with a feed on time adjustable from 1/4 second to 5 seconds.

This adjustment is on the cube with a little screw slot
The off time (Heat selection) is remotely adjustable from 3/10 second to 10 seconds.

The middle unit is the lockout relay and is rated at from 5-30 seconds, but leaving the initiate tabs open it will lock in and stay on until the power is cut (power outage or unplug) and is the safety if the power fails.

The Right unit is the start up timer and will stay on once initiated from 1 to 30 minutes to allow the low temp snap switch to close and bypass this relay once the stove has heat in the exhaust housing.


The second piccy is my little buddy guarding the new parts

 

I liked the resistor array / rotary switch idea for that reason - the stove will not be allowed to go out of safe operating range. Possibly just wire up (6) positions?

* Cats like to party, they will turn up that stove controller when you're not looking.

 

I have a ton of resistors now and a few different selector switches to choose from.

I also just picked up a cool little panel mount ohm meter.

I am still leaning towards using the 1 m ohm pot with the meter connected to indicate the heat selection.

**** The meter will show the resistance in readings like 700, 600, 500 or whatever the pot is set at and these numbers correlate directly to seconds of off time in the feed timer. ****

With the pot the time can be tweaked in very fine increments.

My current notion is to put a little friction type lock (Bomb guard) on the control.

Using the pot really cleans up the interior of the control box too, as it eliminates a ton of wires, the resistor array board and its enclosure plus the large rotary switch.

I used the resistor design on the P2 controller, but that box has far fewer components in it.

The P2 does not use a start relay and any of the circuits envolved, as well as the extra controls for the fans.
It has one fan the is the room air and helps add air to the fire pot.
The exhaust fan runs full line voltage all the time.

There is one phase controller for the room air fan

The ADV 2T custom box has 6 cube relay/timers.

1 Lockout relay
2 phase controls for the fans
1 auger timer
1 power transfer relay to feed power to the system once the low temp snap closes
1 start up relay to power things during the warm up cycle.

2 pots to control the phase controllers
2 volt meters to monitor the fan voltages
4 fuse holders
1 main switch
1 auger switch
1 momentary start button
1 reset momentary (lockout reset)
1 momentary to run auger in prime mode (full speed)
6 LED lamps to monitor functions
1 pot/rotary ??? for heat selection
1 meter to indicate heat selection.

THEN ALL THE SPAGHETTI TO CONNECT IT

Butttttttttttttt, after tracing out the miles of ittsy bittsy lines on a factory board the stuff is about the same.

They just do it with low voltage controls.

Likely 5 to 35 volts in the control side of things.

By using the low voltage controls they can manage things handily with very tiny parts.

Buttttttt, one issue and pooooooof

 

That actually sounds very cool, Snowy. A lot less wiring vs. a resistor array & rotary switch..

re: friction lock - don't worry, your cat is taking notes while you build: he'll figure it out, no problem.

That's a lot of hardware 'real estate' - are you going to keep the control unit separate from the stove, vs. mounted to the side ?

 

Yup.

The Sphynx cats have longer toes too, and she can actually pick up a pen/pencil with her front paws.

Maybe a combination of things.

Actually the biggest worry is the knob getting accidentally bumped while around the stove.

A little bracket with a small plastic thumb screw to lock the knob.

 

I've always thought about breaking out my electronics texts books from school and seeing about designing some control boards for pellets stoves. Electronics used to be my thing in school. Been a while but I'm sure it wouldn't take me long to get back into it. If I ever quit starting projects around the house I might look into it!

 

A spot I always found great for buying electrical parts when I did a lot of it was Digikey.