Coal-trol on feed rate

Can I leave my coal-trol on feed rate instead of having it on round robin? With the warm temps this winter I have been able to set the coal-trol at max feed rate of 14 and leave it there.Is it ok to do that? Or should I set my min at 6 and my max at 40 and put it in the round robin? The reason I like it set on the feed rate is the fan is not blowing hard when it calls for heat when in the round robin.Or is there a way to have it in round robin and not have the fan blow so hard when it calls for heat.The stove is in our basement and my wifes office is close the the stove and when he stove calls for heat in the round robin it is rather loud. Thanks in advance for any advice.

Mike

You can't leave it on the FR screen, it will go back to round robin after 30 seconds. But you can leave it on the MIN or MAX screen and use those to manually control the feed rate. We don't generally recommend that, but if it is working for you, so be it I suppose. One of the ideas for future features is the ability to set a "maximum fan speed", which would be used just for the kind of situation you describe.

The other option is to run the convection fan off a rheostat and then set your MAX to 14, MIN at 6 (or whatever you use) and then let the Coal-trol run normally in the round robin.

You can also use the manual fan control on the Coal-trol to manually set the fan speed. Goto the FSA screen and use the up and down buttons to change it to FSM ##. Select the speed you want and it will hold there. There is a safety feature which will kick the fan speed back to automatic control if the FR climbs above 60 for 60 minutes. But, when this happens you can just put the control back into manual fan speed mode. The safety feature is there to help make sure you don't burn too hot or, depending on fan location ont he stove, overhead it by running too slow with a hot stove body near by. If you are using an unusually low MAX setting, though, then you can pretty safely ignore that concern and bump it back to manual fan speed mode.

Unfortunately, by using MAX in this out of spec way (it is meant to define the maximum fire stoking rate for the control) the control has no way of knowing 14 is a low fire. To really satisfy this issue we'd have to add a new parameter where you could leave MIN and MAX set to define minimum stove fire and maximum stove fire, and then a new pseudo MAX setting that allows the user to artificially limit the FR, which would in turn limit how high the fan speed got. As an aside, we actually have this in one of our ideas for controlling overshooting, where the control will automatically manipulate a virtual FR ceiling based on if it detects overshoot or undershoot.

mprov wrote:Can I leave my coal-trol on feed rate instead of having it on round robin? With the warm temps this winter I have been able to set the coal-trol at max feed rate of 14 and leave it there.Is it ok to do that? Or should I set my min at 6 and my max at 40 and put it in the round robin? The reason I like it set on the feed rate is the fan is not blowing hard when it calls for heat when in the round robin.Or is there a way to have it in round robin and not have the fan blow so hard when it calls for heat.The stove is in our basement and my wifes office is close the the stove and when he stove calls for heat in the round robin it is rather loud. Thanks in advance for any advice.

Mike

Been doing what you propose (leaving on max and walking away) for the third year here, just heat soaking the room like a wood stove. When it is expected to get cold at night, I'll bang it up max a bit and sometimes boost the convection speed a bit or vice versa.

Noise is constant & pretty quiet since I run the convection motors at 36 to maybe 62 at most for harder burns. Another bit of thought....with running at a lower fixed feed you can bring the fan speeds down to 30 or so and your wattage consumption is like 120-130 watts.

If I am not mistaken if you run the feed rate at max, just like when you set the default feed rate to 10 by holding the ? button until you see feed, use the up arrow to the number 10, and the unit ramps up and runs the convection fan accordingly.

Depends on the version he has. When on the MAX screen on older models the convection fan would run as if the normal control logic was still in control of the stoker. So on those models you could have it on manual fan control and use the MAX screen in the way Ugly describes. We thought that was a bit unreasonable since the if someone let it run at MAX for a while, the control logic would dial the fan to off before too long (since temperature setpoint would have been met). We changed this behavior in the V3 code so that the fan would run at max speed while on the MAX setting screen.