Old Mill Stoker using a Coal Trol

Thanks Paul. Glad to hear I am blazing a new trail for CoalTrol..lol.

I have been burning pretty good for a few weeks now. The only problems I have run into was a faulty smoke alarm in my house. I have 6 smoke alarms and only one was going off. I thought maybe it was the stove so I inspected it and shut it down. I did find that I had a wire to close to the back of the stove which was starting to melt. I had to re-wire the convection blower to keep this from happening again. Oddly enough, this was not the reason the alarm was going off. Once I had the stove shut down for a few days, I took the suspect alarm down and replaced it with another in the same spot. I then set the suspect alarm on the kitchen table and it went off the next day.

The CoalTrol has been nice. I wired up another Old Mill years ago for an ex girlfriend and had manual controls on it. This CoalTrol on the Old Mill has maintained a pretty good burn for the 2 weeks I had it up. I should also point out that I burned about 150lbs in that time...which is a little more than 10lbs a day.

My settings are Min=18, Max=85.

The only thing I am concerned about is having the convection blower shut down by the Coal Trol. I know that when those motors get too hot from not being run that they don't like to operate. i found this out when I had to move a junction box for it. I unplugged the convection blower and moved the junction box while I was still burning. I wanted to move the jbox a little more away from the rear of the stove to keep it from getting hot. Once I returned power to the convection blower it would not work. I had to take a fan and cool it down for it to start turning again. So right now I have it set to MANFAN to keep it going. I didn't notice if it was not working at all during the last 2 weeks.

Neal

Another option on the convection fan is to set CFT to 0 (in SETUP menu). This will force it to run at least at minimum speed all the time. You can adjust minimum speed via the CFM setting in the Advanced menu (press and hold MENU button for 15 seconds or so, then tap until it displays the "CFM" screen, use up and down buttons to adjust it). Be careful adjusting CFM as it is possible to set it so low that the motor doesn't turn, which will lead to overheating and possible damage. For safety I'd recommend finding that point at which it doesn't turn and then using a setting 5 or 10 higher as your minimum setting for CFM. Unfortunately each motor can be different for this CFM setting. We ship with a default of 30 since it is always high enough in our experience, but there is usually some room to lower it if a customer wants to experiment and take on the risk of setting it too low.

Hi Paul.

I tried setting CFT=0, however the motor will still shut off. Shouldn't it stay running?

Neal

Well Neal, since you have a stove unknown to us, the convection blower may need to be matched up with the Coal-trol. In the ADVANCED menu, there is a setting
called [CFM] normally set to 40, that you may need to boost up some. The idea is to have a minimum speed that allows the motor to run within it's temperature range.
This means it must turn fast enough so that a fan built into the motor itself provides enough cooling at low speeds.
Allowing the motor to have energy when stalled is not good. Paul V. put up some info on how to get to the ADVANCED menu on the Coal-trol section of the forum.

Neil

Thanks..I will try it out.

Here is a link to the Convection blower I have. I was looking around for a replacement recently and found the exact same one that is used on my stove.

http://www.stove-parts-unlimited.com/18 ... /1tf18.htm

Neal

Where on the stove is this blower mounted? I ask because we've seen these types mounted high on the stove, between the stove and a rear mounted hopper. In this case, if the blower doesn't have adequate insulation from the stove, it can rather easily overheat due to around a hot area of the stove. If this is the case on your stove, or if the motor casing gets hot to the touch during low speed running, definitely increase CFM to 50 to be on the safe side.

Yes, you are correct. It is mounted high between the stove and the hopper. I have it set at CFM=41, and it has not shut off.

I think it is good now.

Thanks for you help.

Neal

Update**

It seems that I was burning a bad batch of coal which I believe was the reason why my minimum feed setting was so high. After I got a load of a more premium blend I was able to adjust the feed to Min=14. I may be able to turn it down a little bit more still.

Old Mill Feed Rate
Min=14
Max=85

Thanks for the update!

99.9% sure my feed rate was a Coal Quality related issue.

Updated Old Mill Feed Rate

Min=10
Max=75 (Max feed rate has not been tested, however I lowered it to be somewhat in proportion to the new Min setting)