Whitfield stand-alone: unburned pellets blocking chute when on HIGH

[Ranger72]

You have an older Whit like mine, did you remove the inner ash traps or is yours slightly newer and not have the removable ash traps?

 

[Bioburner]

Way to go. Little dust -ash don't hurt. After things warm up when the weather breaks you can again tackle the project and with some higher heat fires the stove may clear some of the gunk.
Stay warm, some ugly cold moving east. -14 here now and falling.

 

[dreamingofpalmtrees]

Are you referring to the ash traps on each side behind the fire brick? No. I saw screws there, but was frankly too scared to go that far.
Next time. How often should the firebrick be removed and the stove cleaned behind there?

 

[dreamingofpalmtrees]

Yeah - re: weather. It was 45 today, lots of melting, but they said it was going to freeze overnight - so all those puddles? I can skate to work tomorrow.
Ready for warmer weather.

 

[Bioburner]

According to page 9 of the manual about every week or so depending on fuel to take the panels off and clean and pull ash traps. Pretty common SOP on the whole stove line.

 

[Ranger72]

There will be lots of ash behind those baffles. If your stove has them, the older ones do. Two screws in each one.

 

[Wilbur Feral]

Just reading this thread a few days late. Whitfields require removal of firebricks and thorough cleaning with a small hose attached to a powerful vacuum, or you just can't get the ash put of the small areas of the air path. Helps to tap on the stove with a plastic mallet as well, and to run a bottle brush up the air path, all followed by more vacuuming with the small hose. They're a fantastic old stove, but once they start to get dirty there's not much forgiveness. If the stove is backing up pellets and the air path is known to be clean it may be that a layer of ash has formed at the bottom of the burn pot grate. A quick stir of maybe 5 seconds with a fireplace poker fixes it for me.

 

[stmar]

I put the pellet feed on medium (settings are low, med and high) and I put the blower on high (settings are low, med and high). I try and keep the blower on a higher setting than the feed. I have a convention motor going so did some playing with the settings and when I had the pellet feed on high it put out too many pellets which sounds like your problem. After you clean the stove good try playing with the feed and blower settings. There is also a draft setting, mine is on the left side of the stove.

 

[Bioburner]

convention motor

???

 

[Ranger72]

???

Flux capacitor maybe?

 

[Bioburner]

I know Wyoming lost the HighSchool Rodeo Championship

 

[SmokeyTheBear]

???

Speel check ???

 

[Ranger72]

Whuts spel chek?

 

[Bioburner]

combutton motor? Our other Wyoming contributor has a pretty good sense of humor. I hope stmar hasn't got his frozen

 

[Ranger72]

combutton motor? Our other Wyoming contributor has a pretty good sense of humor. I hope stmar hasn't got his frozen

His user name was supposed to be 'smart', but he spelled it wrong.

 

[SmokeyTheBear]

Whuts spel chek?

That what makes those funny spelling mistakes that show up all the time, even typos come out as real words when they shouldn’t, I can certainly make a lot of typos.

I'd hope that stmar understands that translation isn't our strong suit and neither is typing or spelling. We however love to have a laugh at some of same.

 

[Bioburner]

One reason I try to use exhaust fan instead of combustion fan

 

[SidecarFlip]

Could be a chunk of unobtainnum stuck in the chute thats blocking the pellets......

 

[stmar]

Spell check did not save me this time guys; convention convection contrition convolution. What I should have said was "That motor thingy that blows air over the pellets"!! Did not hear about the rodeo loss, been kind of out of touch this week.

 

[Bioburner]

Many cases of pellets being misspelled. Had a long conversation on pallet burning stoves
Rodeo thing was several years ago. Major $$$$ loss for Gillette. Pyrotechnic Guild International Fireworks Convention being held there several times and local Motels, Hotels jacked rates way up and I don't know if the PGI is going back.

 

[stmar]

Gillette has always been high $$$ on most everything, all that coal money pumped into the community. Rarely see a deal over that way although I did pick up a Honda Foreman a few years ago, they put the wrong price in the add and honored it. Gillette is usually retail plus plus for cars, housing, food, etc.

 

[Lionpaw38]

So, we are in the frigid northeast - using an older Whitfield freestanding pellet stove. We've had pellet stoves for 20+ years. We've had this stove for a few seasons - it CRANKS, and when on high produces a lot of heat.

The problem? When you turn it up to 4 or 5, eventually (within an hour) the burn pot and chute become blocked with unburned pellets. Just now, I smelled smoke and saw that the pellets that were backed up in the chute were burning. Not good. So we turned the stove off til that stopped and it's running on "1" right now. No back up, it's fine. But honestly - it's not creating the heat we really need (it's ZERO outside).

The current pellets we are burning are "Agway" (they stink), and of course have half a pallet to go. The pellets from Lowes/Home Depot that we burned earlier in the season had their own issues, but this wasn't one of them.

Is there anything we can do to solve this? We certainly don't want a chute fire - is there some sort of mechanism to keep the hopper from catching on fire?

It's a bummer to feel like we are freezing, because we have to keep the stove on "1". It gets cold in the room just 5' away from it.

We're thinking it's the pellets - but sure would love to hear if there's a way to fix this. We have 4' of snow outside!
Did I mention it's zero outside? Yeah. Maybe I did.

Thank you!

I'm a little late but I had been going nuts trying to figure out why my Whitfield Quest was piling up unburnt pellets. If I set the stove to anything above low in about 5 hours I would have pellets piled up to the drop shute. Cleaned the crap out of it along with taking a compressor and blowing out the blower and combustion fan to no avail. Tried different pellets and different settings...no go. Replaced the pan and door seals...nothing. Finally I replaced the combustion blower even though it seemed to be working fine and it worked perfectly after that. Apparently even though the blower was running it wasn't up to speed which created piles of ash and unburnt pellets. So if all the above cheap stuff doesn't work its entirely possible your combustion blower is week. I found the blower on Amazon for 88 dollars when everyone else wanted 150.....good luck.

 

[stellep]

+1 on the slow fan. Like the insurance guy, been there, covered it.

I should mention that oiling the fan fixed it.