Coal Trol Operation With a Leisure Line Pocono

I recently had a Leisure Line Pocono installed. I have a question about the coal trol operation. So I turn the stove on and the house is around 59, I have the set point at 67. I left the min and max feed rates at the factory defaults (6 and 40 I believe). The house is kind of big around 2500 sf so all seems to be going well and over the course of about 2 hrs the temp slowly rises and approaches the set point of 67, as the temp approaches and continues to climb to 71 the feed rate percentage never goes off of 99%. Even an hour after the it reaches 71 the feed rate is still 99? It eventually came down but not for a few hrs. Why is it taking so long? AM I doing something wrong? What kind of a control system is this PID , or just a single method controller, like proportion, integral, or derivative only?

duramaxsp33d,
We are recommending that before you light the stove, you temporarily reduce the temperature setting below the room temperature. In your example, from the Round-Robin display, you would press the DOWN button a number of times until the setting is below 67, say about 60F. This way the control will build the fire up from a low firing rate [FR] percentage value. After the initial starting fuel burns, say about 15-30 minutes, you can increase the setting to your desire.

The reason this occurs, is that the Coal-trol is unaware that you just started a fire with a couple of pounds of coal. In fact, the Coal-trol is unaware that you even have a fire going at all. The control only knows what the setting and actual room temperatures are. That is why it is trying to feed at 99% with no fire.

Neil

It sometime takes a while after you first put power to the coal trol for it to settle down. It also is only permitted to ramp up or ramp its feed rates down at a certain rate so as to in normal situations allows the controler to not overshoot its set point. Your observations are normal from what I have seen over 4yrs of operation. After its up and running +/- .5 degrees is the norm.

Like they stated, always start with the temp at or below the room temperature until the stove it up to temperature, then raise the temp a few degrees at a time until it catches up,

COAL is SLOW in responding, it's not like a gas or propane furnace that is almost instant and can heat up fast in a short period of time. The CoalTrol will keep raising the feed rate to make up the difference in temp, so a large swing in temp from room temp to setpoint, will make it raise faster and possibly overshoot, then takes a while to cool back down....Depends on how far away your heat source is from your thermostat.

Once you get the temp up, I wouldn't change it too much, maybe 2-3 degrees at a time.

I usually just leave mine around that same temp or 1-2 degrees different, so it doesn't have big temp swings...Takes a bit, but you will get it dialed in and it will maintain temps.

OK, so I tried setting the set pt below the actual temp. for start up, and this has helped with the over shoot some. I have another question, the temp. reading on the coal trol does not seem to be accurate. It is mounted on a wall next to 2 other digital thermostats for other hvac systems. The coal trol seems not to accurately measure a lower temp as the house cools down. For example, last night I set my overnight set pt to 63. I get up this morn. at 5 and it's 56 in the house so im like wtf. I go out to the thermostats, two read 56 and the coal trol reads 65. Now I was thinking maybe it just needs some time so I check it again when I leave for work at 7:30 and it still says 66 as the room temp. For some reason it does not like to accurately measure the room temp. Any ideas.

The guys at CoalTrol can tell you how to Calibrate it....it's in the advanced settings depending on which thermostat you have. Which one do you have?

I had to re-calibrate mine, it was 5-6+ degrees off too!!

WNY wrote:The guys at CoalTrol can tell you how to Calibrate it....it's in the advanced settings depending on which thermostat you have. Which one do you have?

I had to re-calibrate mine, it was 5-6+ degrees off too!!

Ok cool I will look in the book tonight, I read most of it but not the whole thing yet. I'm not sure which one I have.

Here is the writeup on the advanced features menu, how to get to it, etc. The temperature calibration is covered in the first 3 items. You'll see the raw temp and adjusted temp screens alternating when you get to the advanced menu. To adjust the "adjusted temp" value use the up and down buttons, which will bring you to the "TB" (temperature bias) screen. Remember larger values of TB mean lower adjusted temperature values and vice versa. 7 points of TB for every degree F of adjusted temperature. After adjusting on the TB screen wait a second or two and it will return to the adjusted and raw temp display cycle so you can see what it will now read. Keep adjusting until you get the adjusted screen to show what you want.

Call the shop at 315-299-3589 if you run into problems making this adjustment and we'll help you through it.