USSC 6041 adjustments

[Maxaduke]

Good morning. New member here. I have read through most of the posts on the USSC 6041, very informative. We have had our stove for 5 years with no major issues. This year we bought a different type of pellets and they do not burn as hot. Wanting to verify what adjustments to be made. DF and or HR? Also, I saw where it is recommended to plug the holes in the back of the stove under the fake brick and would like to know the reason behind that.

I would like to add that we run the stove in “auto”. I tried running the stove with the draft door closed all of the way after lighting the stove and in approx 2 hours the burn pot was overflowing with pellets backing up into the shoot. Do not want to experience that again.

Thank you for you assistance.

 

[ARC]

I saw where it is recommended to plug the holes in the back of the stove under the fake brick and would like to know the reason behind that.

Filling those two holes with 1 1/2 " electric knockout plugs forces more heat/flame through the heat exchange pathway giving you more heat into the room. With out the plugs some heat goes out those holes and is sucked out the exhaust. Just remember you will have to take them out and clean behind the wall with brush each time you clean, they just snap in so it is easy. You can buy them at any Lowes or Home Depot in the electrical section they are used to plug holes in electric breaker boxes.

 

[ARC]

Wanting to verify what adjustments to be made. DF and or HR?

Increasing DF (draft) might make the pellets burn cleaner but is not going to increase temperature much, a lower quality pellet is always going to be a lower quality pellet no matter what adjustments you make.

Increasing the HR (heat range) will produce more heat but you will be using more pellets. You can also adjust your feed rate using "C" codes or the feed rate adjustment “HR” UP & “AUX” UP, “HR” DOWN & “AUX” DOWN, but once again you are going to use more pellets to get more heat.

I would like to add that we run the stove in “auto”. I tried running the stove with the draft door closed

I too run my stove in auto and use the draft door to fine tune the flame/burn. If Firepotpete is around he can tell you how to use the feed rates and draft speeds to fine tune your stove he's smarter then I am. Do you have the outside air kit installed and if so did you remove the cap under the burn pot?

 

[Maxaduke]

Increasing DF (draft) might make the pellets burn cleaner but is not going to increase temperature much, a lower quality pellet is always going to be a lower quality pellet no matter what adjustments you make.

Increasing the HR (heat range) will produce more heat but you will be using more pellets. You can also adjust your feed rate using "C" codes or the feed rate adjustment “HR” UP & “AUX” UP, “HR” DOWN & “AUX” DOWN, but once again you are going to use more pellets to get more heat.



I too run my stove in auto and use the draft door to fine tune the flame/burn. If Firepotpete is around he can tell you how to use the feed rates and draft speeds to fine tune your stove he's smarter then I am. Do you have the outside air kit installed and if so did you remove the cap under the burn pot?

We do have the outside air kit installed. As I said, all has been fine for 5 years. As the stove is running I can not look to see if the plug under the pot has been removed, but I feel certain it had been. Because the issue of less heat started with the new pellets I am trying to learn which adjustments to make to increase the heat on HR1.

 

[ARC]

I tried running the stove with the draft door closed all of the way after lighting the stove and in approx 2 hours the burn pot was overflowing with pellets backing up into the shoot

The reason I asked about the cap under the burn pot and if OAK is installed there usually is to much draft and your burn pot does not overflow. Most have to add a ball valve to OAK or drill three 3/8 holes in cap and reinstall like I did to reduce draft. See cap in picture.

 

[ARC]

Because the issue of less heat started with the new pellets I am trying to learn which adjustments to make to increase the heat on HR1.

I would use the "C" codes to change the feed rate, write down the feed rate displayed before you make any changes so you can reset it if needed. Any change you make effects all heat ranges so if you increase the low heat range by .5 it will effect heat ranges 1-5 and if you change the high heat range it will also effect all heat ranges 1-5. I would just change lower heat range by .5 then run stove for a hour if still not enough increase by .5 , if you write original rate down you can always go back to it. Like I stated before Firepotpete know more about feed rates then I do.

ADJUSTING OPERATIONAL CONSTANTS
TO ADJUST THE OPERATION CONSTANTS, PRESS & HOLD THE “MODE” AND “AUGER DELAY”
BUTTONS SIMUTANEOUSLY FOR 3 SECONDS. THE DISPLAY WILL SHOW “C-1”. USE THE HEAT
RANGE UP OR HEAT RANGE DOWN BUTTONS TO CHANGE THE CONSTANT NUMBER (SEE THE
LIST OF VALUES BELOW). WHEN THE DESIRED CONSTANT IS DISPLAYED, PRESS THE “ON”
BUTTON UP, TOGGLING BETWEEN VIEWING AND EDITING THE VALUE. WHILE EDITING A
PARAMETER, USE THE “AUX UP” AND THE “AUX DOWN” BUTTONS TO ADJUST THE VALUE TO
THE DESIRED POINT. THEN PRESS “ON” AGAIN TO RETURN TO THE CONSTANT NUMBER LIST.
PRESS THE “OFF’ BUTTON TO EXIT THE ADJUST OPERATIONAL CONSTANTS MODE.
 C-1- RESET TO DEFAULTS (HOLD “MODE” AND “AUGER DELAY” BUTTONS FOR 3 SECONDS
TO RESET ALL TO DEFAULTS.
 C-2- FUEL LBS. PER HOUR HR-1 (0.01-6.50) - THIS IS THE FUEL RATE IN POUNDS PER
HOUR FOR A HEAT RATE SETTING OF 1.
 C-3- FUEL LBS. PER HOUR HR-3 (0.01-6.50) - THIS IS THE FUEL RATE IN POUNDS PER
HOUR FOR A HEAT RANGE SETTING OF 5. THE DEFAULT IS 5.00 LBS. THE FUEL RATES
USED BETWEEN SETTINGS 1 AND 3 ARE LINEARLY INTERPOLATED BETWEEN THE TWO
SETTINGS.

 

[FirepotPete]

ARC my wife would disagree with you about me!

To the OP as ARC said you need to find what your feed and exhaust rates are set at right now. You need to know the lowest and highest for each. Also you have to make sure that plug for the OAK/FAK is either removed or holes drilled in it.

A Rutland (or other make) magnetic thermometer on the stack (exhaust) and a meat type thermometer in one of the room fan holes will be of great assistance now and in the future. They don't have to be expensive or even very accurate as you really only need to take notes of the bench mark temps to compare later. In other words if you just cleaned the stove and restart it, once up and running for an hour or so, say on HR1, full Auto, room fan temp is 140°F and the stack temp is also 140°F.

Those temps will give you an idea as to if the stove needs cleaning or if one of the fans is going out. Any major change will tip you off. Also run through all the HR's and write down those numbers, with a clean stove of course.

One thing is that you are running the stove on full Auto, does that include the Room Fan? I have my stove tweaked so that I run the room fan on RF9 the highest setting. The reason for that is I'm cheap, I want every BTU I pay for in my house and not going out the exhaust. If you are not running the room fan manually on it's highest speed you might want to try that before messing with the feed rate PPH or the exhaust settings.

Like ARC said push the buttons and post the HR1 and HR5 pph numbers, then do the same with the exhaust for the high and low and we can move on from there and get you some better heat.

Also if you haven't run the stove since last year and now are using different pellets it may not be the pellets, any surge during the summer or even static spikes can disrupt the memory on the control board, it may be as simple as doing a factory reset to the default settings but we won't know that until you tell us what the pph and exhaust rates are right now.

 

[Maxaduke]

Good morning. At the beginning of the week I went through all of the codes. All were set at factory default levels except the feed rate which we had lowered last season to 1.85 on the low end and 4.85 on the high end. I preformed a reset, and verified by going through all of the codes that it did return to factory defaults. DF 230 low/270 high end, HR 2low/5 high end, RF 250 low/370 high. The OAK does have holes drilled in it.

Running in full auto includes the room fan. How does running the RF on high increase the heat output of the stove?

I do not have thermometers at the moment, will pick them up next week. What differential should there be between the exhaust and the room fan output?

Questioning whether it was the stove or the pellets, we bought a bag of the pellets we used last year and put them through a clean stove. Heated like it has in the past. After researching the difference in the two types of pellets discovered that the old pellets burned at 8400-8700 BTU. The new pellets burn at 8000 BTU.

As I start making adjustments, I want to verify my thinking is correct. If I increase the feed rate and slow the draft fan, will it burn hotter? I “feel” like the draft fan is blowing too high. We did try to shut the draft door and the pot overfilled and snuffed out the fire.

Thank you for your input.

 

[FirepotPete]

Glad you got those numbers and reset, it shows that the board isn't screwed up. I do hope you have it plugged into a good surge protector?

To answer the question about the RF running on high. If you look inside the stove you will see a couple of baffles on each side, those help to mix the air and heat it up before going straight up to the main heat exchanger. The hot air is then pulled through the upper holes above the fake fire brick, behind the stoves back wall and then DOWN to the exhaust and then out the exhaust. The RF blows internally within the inner walls of the stove and then mainly out of the top where most of the heat is exchanged. If you are say producing 5000 btu's on HR 2 but only running the DF on Auto it matches the HR setting and blows lower than on the highest setting. So you might only be getting 2500 btu's coming out the RF and the rest is going out the exhaust. If the RF is set higher you will be stripping more heat out of the stove before it exhausts it.

I've seen some concern about stripping to much out and then the stove shuts down because it senses not enough heat (proof of fire) to run, but I've never had that happen with mine and I've really played with the exhaust and feed settings over the years.

It's good that the plug has holes in it but your last statement you said

As I start making adjustments, I want to verify my thinking is correct. If I increase the feed rate and slow the draft fan, will it burn hotter? I “feel” like the draft fan is blowing too high. We did try to shut the draft door and the pot overfilled and snuffed out the fire.

Your thinking is correct but first you need to address the draft issue. The only time my inside draft is open at all is during startup after cleaning. You have reset the pph to 2pph on HR1. Get the fire burning good on HR1 then slowly close that draft until you see the fire going down, then bump the DF setting UP by 5 to 235, watch for 20 mins if burning good close the draft some more, if not bump it up by 5 again, continue to do this until you get the stove to run without over flowing the pot and the draft completely closed. You have OAK/FAK and once the DF setting is correct you should not have to open that inside draft except when starting the stove.

I guessing that the holes drilled aren't big enough for the 2pph feed rate. I have the plug completely removed from mine, but that's another story. You won't lose any extra heat by bumping that DF up as you can only pull x amount of air through those holes.

The difference in pellet btu's is pretty significant and will make a difference. This is why taking notes to look back at is critical to adjusting the stove from year to year, pellet to pellet and even batches of the same pellet brand can change.

Once you get that DF adjusted to burn on HR1 at 2pph it is then possible to adjust the pph down a little at a time but get it burning right the way it is for now.

I'll attach a graph that shows how moving the pph changes the constant between HR's. The graph is made for the 4 button control board and shows both the available HR1-HR9 and the newer HR1-HR5 settings.

 

[Maxaduke]

Firepot, I would like to thank you for your assistance in 2019. Stove has been working great since we were able to dial it in. However, I have a question. Recently, we were experiencing several days of below 0 temperatures. We were running our stove on 2 and 3 to heat the house. I tried to turn it to 4 one day and was given a ERR 1 approximately 30 minutes later. Our dialed in numbers at the time of this shut down were:
Fuel Rate Low 1.75
Fuel Rate High 4.85
Room Fan low 240
Room Fan hight 370
Draft Fan low 225
Draft fan high 265
C-10 Draft fanfull etc... had been changed from default 1 to 0

We are burning pellets and at the feed rate of 1.75 we have have an output of heat of approx 150-175 degrees. I don't know what the temp was when it shut down on 4, but when running on 3 (at the above feed rates) our output temp was around 300-325 degrees.

Can you see a reason for the stove to shut down on PR 4?

 

[ARC]

Can you see a reason for the stove to shut down on PR 4?

Assuming you are burning straight pellets, I see no reason stove should over heat on 4 with the settings you have posted. I can not run my 6039 at top heat range (9) for more the 1 hour or it will trip high limit switch. When burning mix of corn and pellets I can not run stove on heat range 8 as it trips high limit switch. So if you were running on 5 or burning some kind of mix I could understand it.

Maybe your High limit switch is going bad and tripped at a lower temperature.

 

[Jeremy6500]

I have run mine on 3 (which is my high) for a while with no issues.

I took a look at the programmable settings. You can adjust the over temp temperature, the ramp back tempature and also the max vent tempature.

While I don’t recommend increasing these over the default value because you could damage something, you could verify they are set correctly. You may also be able to reduce the ramp back temp some to keep the stove from shutting down. When the stove reaches that temp it slows the pellet feed rate to get the temp to drop back down. This could give you more of a buffer zone.

Your feed rates don’t look out out of whack.

What is the room fan setup on your stove. On mine I have 2 fans. If the setting to turn on the second room fan is not right mine will go out on high limit and shut down. Not sure if yours is that way, but increasing the room fan speed would increase the heat output and reduce the stove temps.

 

[ARC]

You can adjust the over temp temperature, the ramp back tempature and also the max vent tempature.

His 6041 does not work like your 6500 the 6041 has a over temp switch your 6500 has a temperature sensor (thermistorx2) and your control board reads if it is over temp. The 6041 does not have ability to ramp back temperature or set a max vent temperature.

 

[Maxaduke]

Assuming you are burning straight pellets, I see no reason stove should over heat on 4 with the settings you have posted. I can not run my 6039 at top heat range (9) for more the 1 hour or it will trip high limit switch. When burning mix of corn and pellets I can not run stove on heat range 8 as it trips high limit switch. So if you were running on 5 or burning some kind of mix I could understand it.

Maybe your High limit switch is going bad and tripped at a lower temperature.

We are burning straight pellets. They are rated at 8400-8700 btu.

 

[Maxaduke]

I have run mine on 3 (which is my high) for a while with no issues.

I took a look at the programmable settings. You can adjust the over temp temperature, the ramp back tempature and also the max vent tempature.

While I don’t recommend increasing these over the default value because you could damage something, you could verify they are set correctly. You may also be able to reduce the ramp back temp some to keep the stove from shutting down. When the stove reaches that temp it slows the pellet feed rate to get the temp to drop back down. This could give you more of a buffer zone.

Your feed rates don’t look out out of whack.

What is the room fan setup on your stove. On mine I have 2 fans. If the setting to turn on the second room fan is not right mine will go out on high limit and shut down. Not sure if yours is that way, but increasing the room fan speed would increase the heat output and reduce the stove temps.

If I could adjust, which I don't believe I can, the temperature and ramp back temp's I don't believe I want to. There is a reason for the safety feature, one I am not comfortable with changing.

 

[ARC]

We are burning straight pellets. They are rated at 8400-8700 btu

Those are real good pellets but should not burn hot enough on the settings you posted to trip the over heat switch. I sure Firepotpete will be on later or tomorrow the only thing I can think of is the high limit switch is starting to fail.

 

[Jeremy6500]

His 6041 does not work like your 6500 the 6041 has a over temp switch your 6500 has a temperature sensor (thermistorx2) and your control board reads if it is over temp. The 6041 does not have ability to ramp back temperature or set a max vent temperature

His 6041 does not work like your 6500 the 6041 has a over temp switch your 6500 has a temperature sensor (thermistorx2) and your control board reads if it is over temp. The 6041 does not have ability to ramp back temperature or set a max vent temperature.

Gotcha. It makes me wonder if it is a faulty switch of some kind or an airflow issue that could be letting too much heat build up.

For me the first rule with any issue that presents itself is to clean the stove AND venting spotless. Ash buildup causes all kind of issues

 

[Jeremy6500]

If I could adjust, which I don't believe I can, the temperature and ramp back temp's I don't believe I want to. There is a reason for the safety feature, one I am not comfortable with changing.

Definitely good to think about consequences when changing settings. I DEFINITELY do not recommend raising those temp setting, if you are able. I was suggesting verifying they were set to the correct defaults.my recommendation of lowering the ramp back temp would actually lower the temp at which your stove would reduce the pellet feed rate. My thought process walls that the ramp back rate was too close to the over temp. Lowering the ramp back would cut the pellet feeed at a lower temp and allow more time for temp adjustment prior to an over temp condition

 

[Jeremy6500]

How many heat settings do you have? Is 4 your highest?

 

[Maxaduke]

How many heat settings do you have? Is 4 your highest?

5 is my highest setting. If I understand you - The listed values I gave early are lowered. The default low (HR1 is 2) We are set at 1.75 and the default high (HR5 is 5) We are at 4.85.

 

[Maxaduke]

Those are real good pellets but should not burn hot enough on the settings you posted to trip the over heat switch. I sure Firepotpete will be on later or tomorrow the only thing I can think of is the high limit switch is starting to fail.

Thank you

 

[ARC]

Can you see a reason for the stove to shut down on PR 4?

Next time you shut down for cleaning check the fins on your room blower. I usually clean them once a year but they can get caked on dust (cat hair at my house) and then the room blower would be pushing less air. I think you would notice if the room blower was not blowing enough air but it is hard to tell if it happen over a long time frame.

 

[FirepotPete]

How many heat settings do you have? Is 4 your highest?

A proportional control board will always have an odd number of settings, never even amount. 3-5-7-9 for instance, never 2-4-6-8.

 

[FirepotPete]

Thank you

I agree, with what we know it should be the high limit switch causing the problem.

 

[Maxaduke]

I agree, with what we know it should be the high limit switch causing the problem.

Do you know what the cut off is for the high temp switch?
I would also like to follow up with some additional information that may help clarify the situation.
As I stated we had been have cold temperatures for several days and the stove had been running continuously for 3 days on 2 and 3 before we turned it to level 4. So it had accumulated a lot of ash by this time.
I have also taken the side panel off and discovered that the room fan was indeed clogged with dirt, dog hair, etc.. Which I have since cleaned. Could these two items, cause the stove to get hotter then it should and shut down?