Help Getting Started With Used Coal-Trol TS2

Hello,

I just hooked up a used Pocono with a Coal-Trol TS2 control. I have the fire burning, and I once saw the feed motor turn, but no coal has made it to the bottom of the burn plate so it is not feeding correctly. The convection fans are running, but it says MANFAN on the control so I assume it is not really affected by the settings.

It keeps flashing NOFIRE on the control. I've gone through a few of the Coal-Trol manuals, but I don't know how to just turn on the defaults and go from there.

I am feeding the stove with shovels of coal right now.

Is the direction of the network type cable important? Maybe I have it backwards. But it seems to be communicating.

Please, somebody help me get this stove running. Thank you in advance.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the Coal-Trol unit on the back of the hopper is buzzing. I don't know if it should.

What flashes on the thermostat part is:

MANFAN
NOFIRE
67F
D73F
238P (the time I checked)

When I cycle through setup I get:
N70F
64F
FSM 82
FR 99
D541A
D73F
N505P

Below are some pics on how the stove is set up.

I found the advanced menu thread.

I'm going to try holding the menu button down for 15 seconds and go to RESET, then press up.

I'll post back.

OK, did the reset.

NOFIRE is not there anymore, but MANFAN still is.

It's feeding +99 to 99 without the plus.

Getting hot fast. Fire is hard to look at.

Day and night times changed.

Any help getting me in the right direction would be wonderful. I will be away tomorrow and will shut the stove down if I don't know what I'm doing by then.

Thanks.

FR 99 is the feed rate. When there is a + on there that just means that the stoker motor is currently on.

NOFIRE meant that the IGN setting in SETUP was set to M (manual) instead of N (none). N should be the setting you use since you do not have one of our igniters (not for sale anymore).

Your next step is to set you MIN and MAX values in SETUP menu to suggested defaults for your stove, 6 and 40. You get to SETUP menu by pressing and hold MENU button for 3 seconds or so, until the word SETUP displays. Then go on the MIN screen (tap MENU button until it shows up) and leave it there so the fire comes down to that setting (wait 30-40 minutes). Then adjust it a point at a time up or down as needed, with 15-20 minutes between adjustments, to dial it in for your particular stove. Then do the same for the MAX setting. For max you're aiming to have the fire full, but no burning coals falling off the grate. There should be 1-1.5 inches of ash at the end of the grate for full burn.

Fan speed (MANFAN) is adjusted by tapping the MENU button once from the round robin screens. It will display either FSM and a number or FSA. Use the Up and Down buttons to go one higher than 99 or one lower than 1 to set it to FSA (AUTO). Or continue to control the speed manually by adjusting the speed as you wish.

That should get you up and running reasonably well. If you continue to have problems write here, call the shop (315-299-3589) or email ([email protected]).

Thanks.

I'll do what you mentioned right now.

I had gone back in to check it before getting your post, and the magnetic thermometer on the front of the stove read 600F!

I ran and moved the programmable part in front of the stove. It is set to bring the temp up to 73F and was at 63F reading. Now it is at 68F and the temp is dropping to about 550F. All the cement and paint got cured at once so I needed to open some doors to let the smell out.

Thanks again.

pvolcko wrote:
Your next step is to set you MIN and MAX values in SETUP menu to suggested defaults for your stove, 6 and 40. You get to STUP menu by pressing andhold MENU button for 3 seconds ro so, until the work SETUP displays. Then go on the MIN screen (tap MENU button until it shows up) and leave it these so the fire comes down to that setting (wait 30-40 minutes). Then adjust it a point at a time up or down as needed, with 15-20 minutes between adjustments, to dial it in for your particular stove. Then do the same for the MAX setting. For max you're aiming to have the fire full, but no burning off the grate. There should be 1-1.5 inches of ash at the end of the grate for full burn.

Fan speed (MANFAN) is adjusted by tapping the MENU button once from the round robin screens. It will display either FSM and a number or FSA. Use the Up and Down buttons to go one higher than 99 or one lower than 1 to set it to FSA (AUTO). Or continue to control the speed manually by adjusting the speed as you wish.

That should get you up and running reasonably well. If you continue to have problems write here, call the shop (315-299-3589) or email ([email protected]).

I went to setup and it was already at 6 min and 40 max. I assume it was the default setting for the unit when I hit reset.

It was already at FSA also. There is no MANFAN anymore. I heard the motors change pitch as when I scrolled to the point where it said FSA.

pvolcko wrote:
Then adjust it a point at a time up or down as needed, with 15-20 minutes between adjustments, to dial it in for your particular stove. Then do the same for the MAX setting. For max you're aiming to have the fire full, but no burning off the grate. There should be 1-1.5 inches of ash at the end of the grate for full burn.

I'm don't understand what I am adjusting here. What do max and min represent? Right now, there is about an inch and a half of ash at the end of the grate.

Readings when I walked out were:

about 600F on stove front
O 73F
346P
79F

When I hit menu:

FSA
F90
D600A
D70F
N500P
N70F

Thank you for the help.

The stove temp is at around 425F and holding steady.

Room temp is about 70-73F. As the temp steadies, I'm moving the programmer farther out into the room.

It will take some time. I have about 12 tons of machinery in the room, and they started at about 38F.

I think I'm OK now. Thanks again for dealing with my panic.

As my Avatar suggests,.....DON'T PANIC! Lol! It's not a runaway freight train. You can always unplug the thing until you figure out the programming. Sounds like you found the info you need. Excellent!

The MIN and MAX are the number of seconds out of (I believe) 90 sec that the stoker will run for. The MIN sets your idle fire and the MAX sets your maximum fire at full burn. So if your MIN is 6, your stoker will run for 6 sec out of every 90 sec and your MAX setting will run the stoker for 40 sec out of every 90. When your thermostat is calling for heat, the feed rate will adjust the coal feed between these two timing levels.

You may have to adjust the default settings once you learn what you stove can do. With my koker, the default MAX was I believe near 60 like yours. I found last year and with the cold weather we are having this year, my MAX set at 25 actually keeps the house temp more consistent. By having a lower MAX, the feed rates automatically stay high which I believe was suggested in previous posts. I think they recommend that feed rates stay 80 or above during the dead of winter when your stove is really working to maintain temps.

Carbon12 wrote:As my Avatar suggests,.....DON'T PANIC! Lol! It's not a runaway freight train. You can always unplug the thing until you figure out the programming. Sounds like you found the info you need. Excellent!

But I love when Pat Benatar sings "Get Nervous!"

Thanks, yes it's up and running, keeping the garage within a degree up and down like magic. I have some questions about fine tuning some stuff, but that will need to wait until next week.

Meanwhile, with the Hitzer running in one part of the house and the Pocono coming out the door from the garage to heat up the other part, we're getting through these 18F nights with inside temps in the seventies without the oil furnace coming on.

Exceptional!

WNYRob wrote:The MIN and MAX are the number of seconds out of (I believe) 90 sec that the stoker will run for. The MIN sets your idle fire and the MAX sets your maximum fire at full burn. So if your MIN is 6, your stoker will run for 6 sec out of every 90 sec and your MAX setting will run the stoker for 40 sec out of every 90. When your thermostat is calling for heat, the feed rate will adjust the coal feed between these two timing levels.

You may have to adjust the default settings once you learn what you stove can do. With my koker, the default MAX was I believe near 60 like yours. I found last year and with the cold weather we are having this year, my MAX set at 25 actually keeps the house temp more consistent. By having a lower MAX, the feed rates automatically stay high which I believe was suggested in previous posts. I think they recommend that feed rates stay 80 or above during the dead of winter when your stove is really working to maintain temps.

Thank you!

I'll be slowly raising the set temps on the Pocono in order to get some more heat in upstairs guest rooms (for the grandchildren) as temps drop towards zero F. Now that you have explained what those settings mean, I'll be playing with them a little later on.

Thank you again.

Ive been running the Pocono in the garage, with coal-trol, powervent and barometric damper. I'm using a lot of coal.

The garage is about 1,000 square feet with 12 a foot ceiling and the temp is set at 73F day and night. First I left the interior door to the house open so some heat could escape upstairs at about the six foot level, but I used up a whole hopper in 24 hours. So I closed the door.

Even so, I'm adding 1-1/2 bags (in the recent warm weather) to two 40 lb bags of rice coal every twenty four hours. The ash pan gets totally filled in about 18 hours.

I lowered the max feedrate setting to 30 from 40. There is unburned coal in the ashpan as shown in the pics. I have a Hitzer 50-93 heating the rest of the house, over 3,000 square feet, on about a bag or less a day.

I'm new at this, so I'll list everything that I could conceive might cause this issue:

The baro is set at it's "heaviest" position. Anything less and it opens way up and the manometer drops to one or two (from the four to six I'm trying to keep it at). It's breezy where I live so the baro flaps around anyway.

The rice coal was very wet when delivered and is still damp. Black water drained out when I cut bags open in the beginning.

The garage doors are loose enough so that I can feel a slight draft coming in so there's no oxygen starvation, but the garage is fairly well insulated.

There is only coal burning on the top half of the grate. Before turning the feed down, only about the top third of the grate had red coal on it.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. It doesn't make sense to burn so much to heat the garage when I'm using less to heat the whole house. I've heated the garage with a space heater before, and it is not hard to heat.

Some ideas:

1) I couldn't be sure from the picture, but make sure you have a rheostat on the powervent unit so you can control it's speed. Use this along with the baro-damper to set your draft. The idea here is to have the power-vent speed low while maintaining reliable venting. This will minimize the amount of hot air you are venting from the stove and the amount of "make up" air you are pulling from the room through the baro damper.

2) .02-.04 should be your goal, I believe. .04-.06 may be over-venting, which means you are wasting heat both from within the stove and from the room air you're pulling through the baro-damper.

3) Coal quality plays a part here. I don't see much white ash in that coal which is making me think your coal quality is low. Unless this is from an outdoor pile that has had rain hitting it and washed the light ash off it leaving only the larger particles. That said, coal will have aggregates and other stuff in it that either doesn't burn or doesn't burn completely. This does not mean the coal is unburnt. IF you have a lot of this aggregate in there then you may want to look into sourcing your coal from a different supplier and mine.

4) Make sure you have a good grate seal and if there is a damper on the combustion blower you may want/need to open the flap a bit more. This will allow more combustion air up through the coal bed and keep air from leaking out around the grate, providing a more complete burn and extracting as much heat from the coal as possible.

5) You may want to install a combustion air supply pipe near the stove and the combustion motor. This will keep the stove from pulling air from the room (bad to use heated room air for combustion) which can exacerbate leaks around the garage door. Run a PVC pipe out the wall near the stove and terminate it near the combustion motor. Both the combustion motor and the baro damper will tend to draw from this source that way, keeping the heated room air in the room instead.

6) Make sure the thermostat is mounted on an interior wall and not in draft zone or where it will be exposed to direct sunlight. It must be mounted in a normal way without obstruction above or below it where the "vent" holes are on the top and bottom left side. It cannot be laying on a shelf or something like that, it will interfere with it detecting room temp properly.

Thanks. I'll look into all this.

The pics of the ash were taken when I emptied the ash pan, when they were still warm and dry. The rheostat is on the wall near the mano. I'll try dropping down to .02-.04. The powervent is noisy and when it is turned down too much, it "chugs", like vroom....vroom... vroom...

I'll look into the grate seal and whether there is a damper on the combustion chamber of the Pocono. I'll also look into an outside air supply.

The thermostat is just lying on a table, so I'll fix that this weekend.

Thanks for all the help. You pointed me in the right direction.

That flame seems pretty small for the amount of hot coals there. I would make sure the combustion fan is working properly and is clean. Also make sure the grate and under the grate are clear. Make sure the gasket at the back of the grate is there. Everything I am seeing is lack of good combustion.