From the Ashes

The pellet stove’s been acting up lately. It’ll go about a week, then display an error on the thermostat saying the ashpan has problems.

The stove has a little pot (fire pot) in which it ignites and burns the pellets. When it’s done burning and shuts down, the bottom of that pot moves off to the side to let the ash fall to the ash drawer. That movable bottom of the pot is the ash tray.

There’s a motorized arm connected to the side of the ash pan. That’s what moves it off to the side and back. When the error displays, the ash pan is usually caught off to the side of the fire pot.

The first time this happened, I vacuumed and scraped everything real good, then disconnected the motor arm from the ash pan to make sure the motor was working. It all worked on its own. I put it back together and everything worked again.

For a week.

Damn. A week isn’t long enough. This was going to require more work.

This time I took the entire ash pan out. Not an easy task as it’s all tucked up inside the underside of the stove. With the ash pan out, I had a much better idea as to what was happening.

There was a layer of soot or gunk or whatever caked into the ash pan. My guess was the uneven surface of the gunk was causing the ash pan to inefficiently move back and forth under the fire pot until it got stuck. With the ash pan out and handy, I could hit against a wire wheel and clean it all up.

Shiny and smooth again, I put it all back together, which proved to be the hardest part of the job. Because of the location, it was one of those jobs where if you wanted to see you couldn’t get your hands in there. If you wanted to get your hands in there, you couldn’t see. Laying on my back with my hands up behind my head, I felt around until I got it all back together.

So far so good. No ash pan exceptions, though it hasn’t been even a week yet.

– b